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The Girl at the Halfway House

by Emerson Hough · English · Gutenberg #14948 · 488,973 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Girl at the Halfway House

Author: Emerson Hough


        
Release date: February 7, 2005 [eBook #14948]
                Most recently updated: December 19, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14948

Credits: E-text prepared by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GIRL AT THE HALFWAY HOUSE ***


E-text prepared by Al Haines



THE GIRL AT THE HALFWAY HOUSE

A Story of the Plains

by

EMERSON HOUGH

Author of _The Covered Wagon_, _54-40 or Fight_, _North of 36_, etc.

Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers    New York

1900







TO EDWARD KEMEYS,

SOLDIER, HUNTER, AND SCULPTOR,

WHO KNEW AND LOVED THE WEST,

AND WHO HAS PRESERVED ITS SPIRIT IMPERISHABLY,


THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED WITH MANY GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.




CONTENTS


BOOK I

THE DAY OF WAR

CHAPTER

      I. THE BRAZEN TONGUES
     II. THE PLAYERS OF THE GAME
    III. THE VICTORY


BOOK II

THE DAY OF THE BUFFALO

     IV. BATTERSLEIGH OF THE RILE IRISH
      V. THE TURNING OF THE ROAD
     VI. EDWARD FRANKLIN, LAWYER
    VII. THE NEW WORLD
   VIII. THE BEGINNING
     IX. THE NEW MOVERS
      X. THE CHASE
     XI. THE BATTLE
    XII. WHAT THE HAND HAD TO DO
   XIII. PIE AND ETHICS
    XIV. THE FIRST BALL AT ELLISVILLE
     XV. ANOTHER DAY
    XVI. ANOTHER HOUR


BOOK III

THE DAY OF THE CATTLE

   XVII. ELLISVILLE THE RED
  XVIII. STILL A REBEL
    XIX. THAT WHICH HE WOULD
     XX. THE HALFWAY HOUSE
    XXI. THE ADVICE OF AUNT LUCY
   XXII. EN VOYAGE
  XXIII. MARY ELLEN
   XXIV. THE WAY OF A MAID
    XXV. BILL WATSON
   XXVI. IKE ANDERSON
  XXVII. THE BODY OF THE CRIME
 XXVIII. THE TRIAL
   XXIX. THE VERDICT


BOOK IV

THE DAY OF THE PLOUGH

    XXX. THE END OF THE TRAIL
   XXXI. THE SUCCESS OF BATTERSLEIGH
  XXXII. THE CALLING
 XXXIII. THE GREAT COLD
  XXXIV. THE ARTFULNESS OF SAM
   XXXV. THE HILL OF DREAMS
  XXXVI. AT THE GATEWAY





BOOK I

THE DAY OF WAR


CHAPTER I

THE BRAZEN TONGUES

The band major was a poet.  His name is lost to history, but it
deserves a place among the titles of the great.  Only in the soul of a
poet, a great man, could there have been conceived that thought by
which the music of triumph should pass the little pinnacle of human
exultation, and reach the higher plane of human sympathy.

Forty black horses, keeping step; forty trumpeters, keeping unison;
this procession, headed by a mere musician, who none the less was a
poet, a great man, crossed the field of Louisburg as it lay dotted with
the heaps of slain, and dotted also with the groups of those who sought
their slain; crossed that field of woe, meeting only hatred and
despair, yet leaving behind only tears and grief.  Tears and grief, it
is true, yet grief that knew of sympathy, and tears that recked of
other tears.

For a long time the lines of invasion had tightened about the old city
of Louisburg, and Louisburg grew weaker in the coil.  When the clank of
the Southern cavalry advancing to the front rang in the streets, many
were the men swept away with the troops asked to go forward to silence
the eternally throbbing guns.  Only the very old and the very young
were left to care for the homes of Louisburg, and the number of these
grew steadily less as the need increased for more material at the
front.  Then came the Southern infantry, lean, soft-stepping men from
Georgia and the Carolinas, their long black hair low on their necks,
their shoes but tattered bits of leather bound upon their feet, their
blankets made of cotton, but their rifles shining and their drill
perfection.  The wheat lay green upon the fields and the odours of the
blossoms of the peach trees hung heavy on the air; but there was none
who thought of fruitage or of harvest.  Out there in front, where the
guns were pulsing, there went on that grimmer harvest with which the
souls of all were intimately concerned.  The boys who threw up their
hats to greet the infantry were fewer than they had been before the
blossoming of the peach.  The war had grown less particular of its
food.  A boy could speed a bullet, or could stop one.  There were yet
the boys.

Of all the old-time families of this ancient little city none held
position more secure or more willingly accorded than the Fairfaxes and
the Beauchamps.  There had always been a Colonel Fairfax, the leader at
the local bar, perhaps the representative in the Legislature, or in
some position of yet higher trust.  The Beauchamps had always had men
in the ranks of the professions or in stations of responsibility.  They
held large lands, and in the almost feudal creed of the times they gave
large services in return.  The curse of politics had not yet reached
this land of born politicians.  Quietly, smoothly, yet withal keyed to
a high standard of living, the ways of this old community, as of these
two representative families, went on with little change from generation
to generation.

It was not unknown that these two families should intermarry, a Fairfax
finding a wife among the Beauchamps, or perchance a Beauchamp coming to
the Fairfax home to find a mistress for his own household.  It was
considered a matter of course that young Henry Fairfax, son of Colonel
Fairfax, should, after completing his studies at the ancient
institution of William and Mary College, step into his father's law
office, eventually to be admitted to the bar and to become his father's
partner; after which he should marry Miss Ellen Beauchamp, loveliest
daughter of a family noted for its beautiful women.  So much was this
taken for granted, and so fully did it meet the approval of both
families, that the tide of the young people's plans ran on with little
to disturb its current.  With the gallantry of their class the young
men of the plantations round about, the young men of the fastidiously
best, rode in to ask permission of Mary Ellen's father to pay court to
his daughter.  One by one they came, and one by one they rode away
again, but of them all not one remained other than Mary Ellen's loyal
slave.  Her refusal seemed to have so much reason that each
disappointed suitor felt his own defeat quite stingless.  Young Fairfax
seemed so perfectly to represent the traditions of his family, and his
future seemed so secure; and Mary Ellen herself, tall and slender,
bound to be stately and of noble grace, seemed so eminently fit to be a
Beauchamp beauty and a Fairfax bride.

For the young people themselves it may be doubted if there had yet
awakened the passion of genuine, personal love.  They met, but, under
the strict code of that land and time, they never met alone.  They rode
together under the trees along the winding country roads, but never
without the presence of some older relative whose supervision was
conventional if careless.  They met under the honeysuckles on the
gallery of the Beauchamp home, where the air was sweet with the
fragrance of the near-by orchards, but with correct gallantry Henry
Fairfax paid his court rather to the mother than to the daughter.  The
hands of the lovers had touched, their eyes had momentarily
encountered, but their lips had never met.  Over the young girl's soul
there sat still the unbroken mystery of life; nor had the reverent
devotion of the boy yet learned love's iconoclasm.

For two years Colonel Fairfax had been with his regiment, fighting for
what he considered the welfare of his country and for the institutions
in whose justice he had been taught to believe.  There remained at the
old Fairfax home in Louisburg only the wife of Colonel Fairfax and the
son Henry, the latter chafing at a part which seemed to him so
obviously ignoble.  One by one his comrades, even younger than himself,
departed and joined the army hastening forward toward the throbbing
guns.  Spirited and proud, restive under comparisons which he had never
heard but always dreaded to hear.  Henry Fairfax begged his mother to
let him go, though still she said, "Not yet."

But the lines of the enemy tightened ever about Louisburg.  Then came a
day--a fatal day--fraught with the tidings of what seemed a double
death.  The wife of Colonel Henry Fairfax was grande dame that day,
when she buried her husband and sent away her son.  There were yet
traditions to support.

Henry Fairfax said good-bye to Mary Ellen upon the gallery of the old
home, beneath a solemn, white-faced moon, amid the odours of the
drooping honeysuckle.  Had Mary Ellen's eyes not been hid beneath the
lids they might have seen a face pale and sad as her own.  They sat
silent, for it was no time for human speech.  The hour came for
parting, and he rose.  His lips just lightly touched her cheek.  It
seemed to him he heard a faint "good-bye."  He stepped slowly down the
long walk in the moonlight, and his hand was at his face.  Turning at
the gate for the last wrench of separation, he gazed back at a drooping
form upon the gallery.  Then Mrs. Beauchamp came and took Ellen's head
upon her bosom, seeing that now she was a woman, and that her
sufferings had begun.




CHAPTER II

THE PLAYERS OF THE GAME

When the band major was twenty miles away in front of Louisburg his
trumpets sounded always the advance.  The general played the game
calmly.  The line of the march was to be along the main road leading
into the town.  With this course determined, the general massed his
reserves, sent on the column of assault, halted at the edge of the
wood, deployed his skirmishers, advanced them, withdrew them, retreated
but advanced again, ever irresistibly sweeping the board in toward the
base of Louisburg, knight meeting knight, pawn meeting pawn, each side
giving and taking pieces on the red board of war.

The main intrenchments erected in the defences of Louisburg lay at
right angles to the road along which came the Northern advance, and
upon the side of the wood nearest to the town.  Back of the trenches
lay broken fields, cut up by many fences and dotted with occasional
trees.  In the fields both the wheat and the flowers were now trampled
down, and a thousand industrious and complaining bees buzzed protest at
the losing of their commerce.  The defences themselves were but
earthworks, though skilfully laid out.  Along their front, well hidden
by the forest growth, ran a line of entangling abattis of stakes and
sharpened interwoven boughs.

In the centre of the line of defence lay the reserves, the boys of
Louisburg, flanked on either side by regiments of veterans, the lean
and black-haired Georgians and Carolinians, whose steadiness and
unconcern gave comfort to more than one bursting boyish heart.  The
veterans had long played the game of war.  They had long since said
good-bye to their women.  They had seen how small a thing is life, how
easily and swiftly to be ended.  Yellow-pale, their knees standing high
in front of them as they squatted about on the ground, their long black
hair hanging down uncared for, they chewed, smoked, swore, and cooked
as though there was no jarring in the earth, no wide foreboding on the
air.  One man, sitting over his little fire, alternately removed and
touched his lips to the sooty rim of his tin cup, swearing because it
was too hot.  He swore still more loudly and in tones more aggrieved
when a bullet, finding that line, cut off a limb from a tree above and
dropped it into his fire, upsetting the frying pan in which he had
other store of things desirable.  Repairing all this damage as he
might, he lit his pipe and leaned against the tree, sitting with his
knees high in front of him.  There came other bullets, singing,
sighing.  Another bullet found that same line as the man sat there
smoking.

Overhead were small birds, chirping, singing, twittering.  A long black
line of crows passed, tumbling in the air, with much confusion of
chatter and clangour of complaint that their harvest, too, had been
disturbed.  They had been busy.  Why should men play this game when
there were serious things of life?

The general played calmly, and ever the points and edges and fronts of
his advance came on, pressing in toward the last row of the board,
toward the line where lay the boys of Louisburg.  Many a boy was pale
and sick that day, in spite of the encouraging calm or the biting jests
of the veterans.  The strange sighings in the air became more numerous
and more urgent.  Now and then bits of twigs and boughs and leaves came
sifting down, cut by invisible shears, and now and then a sapling
jarred with the thud of an unseen blow.  The long line in the trenches
moved and twisted restlessly.

In front of the trenches were other regiments, out ahead in the woods,
unseen, somewhere toward that place whence came the steadiest jarring
of artillery and the loudest rattling of the lesser arms.  It was very
hard to lie and listen, to imagine, to suspect, to dread.  For hours
the game went on, the reserves at the trenches hearing now distinctly
and now faintly the tumult of the lines, now receding, now coming on.
But the volume of the tumult, and its separation into a thousand
distinct and terrifying sounds, became in the average ever an
increasing and not a lessening thing.  The cracker-popping of the
musketry became less and less a thing of sport, of reminiscences.  The
whinings that passed overhead bore more and more a personal message.
These young men, who but lately had said good-bye to the women of their
kin, began to learn what war might mean.  It had been heretofore a
distant, unmeasured, undreaded thing, conquerable, not to be feared.
It seemed so sweet and fit to go forth, even though it had been hard to
say good-bye!

Now there began to appear in the woods before the trenches the figures
of men, at first scattered, then becoming steadily more numerous.
There came men bearing other men whose arms lopped loosely.  Some men
walked with a hand gripped tightly to an arm; others hobbled painfully.
Two men sometimes supported a third, whose head, heavy and a-droop,
would now and then be kept erect with difficulty, the eyes staring with
a ghastly, sheepish gaze, the face set in a look of horrified surprise.
This awful rabble, the parings of the defeated line in front, dropped
back through the woods, dropped back upon the young reserves, who lay
there in the line.  Some of them could go no farther, but fell there
and lay silent.  Others passed back into the fields where droned the
protesting bees, or where here and there a wide tree offered shelter.
Suddenly all the summer air was filled with anguish and horror.  Was
this, then, the War?

And now there appeared yet other figures among the trees, a straggling,
broken line, which fell back, halted, stood and fired always calmly,
coolly, at some unseen thing in front of them.  But this line resolved
itself into individuals, who came back to the edge of the wood,
methodically picking their way through the abattis, climbing the
intervening fences, and finally clambering into the earthworks to take
their places for the final stand.  They spoke with grinning respect of
that which was out there ahead, coming on.  They threw off their coats
and tightened their belts, making themselves comfortable for what time
there yet remained.  One man saw a soldier sitting under a tree,
leaning against the trunk, his knees high in front of him, his pipe
between his lips.  Getting no answer to his request for the loan of the
pipe, he snatched it without leave, and then, discovering the truth,
went on none the less to enjoy the luxury of a smoke, it seeming to him
desirable to compass this while it yet remained among the possibilities
of life.

At last there came a continued, hoarse, deep cheering, a roaring wave
of menace made up of little sounds.  An officer sprang up to the top of
the breastworks and waved his sword, shouting out something which no
one heard or cared to hear.  The line in the trenches, boys and
veterans, reserves and remnants of the columns of defence, rose and
poured volley after volley, as they could, into the thick and
concealing woods that lay before them.  None the less, there appeared
soon a long, dusty, faded line, trotting, running, walking, falling,
stumbling, but coming on.  It swept like a long serpent parallel to the
works, writhing, smitten but surviving.  It came on through the wood,
writhing, tearing at the cruel abattis laid to entrap it.  It writhed,
roared, but it broke through.  It swept over the rail fences that lay
between the lines and the abattis, and still came on!  This was not
war, but Fate!

There came a cloud of smoke, hiding the face of the intrenchments.
Then the boys of Louisburg saw bursting through this suffocating
curtain a few faces, many faces, long rows of faces, some pale, some
red, some laughing, some horrified, some shouting, some swearing--a
long row of faces that swept through the smoke, following a line of
steel--a line of steel that flickered, waved, and dipped.




CHAPTER III

THE VICTORY

The bandmaster marshalled his music at the head of the column of
occupation which was to march into Louisburg.  The game had been
admirably played.  The victory was complete.  There was no need to
occupy the trenches, for those who lay in them or near them would never
rally for another battle.  The troops fell back behind the wood through
which they had advanced on the preceding day.  They were to form upon
the road which had been the key of the advance, and then to march,
horse and foot in column, into Louisburg, the place of honour at the
head being given to those who had made the final charge to the last
trench and through the abattis.  Gorged with what it had eaten, the
dusty serpent was now slothful and full of sleep.  There was no longer
need for hurry.  Before the middle of the morning the lines would start
on the march of the few short miles.

During the delay a young officer of engineers, Captain Edward Franklin
by name, asked permission of his colonel to advance along the line of
march until he came to the earthworks, to which he wished to give some
examination, joining his regiment as it passed beyond the
fortifications on its march.  The colonel gave his consent, not
altogether willingly.  "You may see more over there than you want to
see, young man," said he.

Franklin went on, following as nearly as he could the line of the
assault of the previous day, a track all too boldly marked by the
horrid _debris_ of the fight.  As he reached the first edge of the
wood, where the victorious column had made its entrance, it seemed to
him that there could have been no such thing as war.  A gray rabbit
hopped comfortably across the field.  Merry squirrels scampered and
scolded in the trees overhead.  The jays jangled and bickered, it is
true, but a score of sweet-voiced, peaceful-throated birds sang bravely
and contentedly as though there had never been a sound more discordant
than their own speech.  The air was soft and sweet, just cold enough to
stir the leaves upon the trees and set them whispering intimately.  The
sky, new washed by the rain which had fallen in the night, was clean
and bright and sweet to look upon, and the sun shone temperately warm.
All about was the suggestion of calm and rest and happiness.  Surely it
had been a dream!  There could have been no battle here.

This that had been a dream was changed into a horrid nightmare as the
young officer advanced into the wood.  About him lay the awful
evidences.  Coats, caps, weapons, bits of gear, all marked and
emphasized with many, many shapeless, ghastly things.  Here they lay,
these integers of the line, huddled, jumbled.  They had all the
contortions, all the frozen ultimate agonies left for survivors to see
and remember, so that they should no more go to war.  Again, they lay
so peacefully calm that all the lesson was acclaim for happy, painless
war.  One rested upon his side, his arm beneath his head as though he
slept.  Another sat against a tree, his head fallen slightly forward,
his lax arms allowing his hands to droop plaintively, palms upward and
half spread, as though he sat in utter weariness.  Some lay upon their
backs where they had turned, thrusting up a knee in the last struggle.
Some lay face downward as the slaughtered fall.  Many had died with
hands open, suddenly.  Others sat huddled, the closed hand with its
thumb turned under and covered by the fingers, betokening a gradual
passing of the vital spark, and a slow submission to the conqueror.  It
was all a hideous and cruel dream.  Surely it could be nothing more.
It could not be reality.  The birds gurgled and twittered.  The
squirrels barked and played.  The sky was innocent.  It must be a dream.

In this part of the wood the dead were mingled from both sides of the
contest, the faded blue and the faded gray sometimes scarce
distinguishable.  Then there came a thickening of the gray, and in
turn, as the traveller advanced toward the fences and abattis, the
Northern dead predominated, though still there were many faces
yellow-pale, dark-framed.  At the abattis the dead lay in a horrid
commingling mass, some hanging forward half through the entanglement,
some still in the attitude of effort, still tearing at the spiked
boughs, some standing upright as though to signal the advance.  The
long row of dead lay here as where the prairie wind drives rolling
weeds, heaping them up against some fence that holds them back from
farther travel.

Franklin passed over the abattis, over the remaining fences, and into
the intrenchments where the final stand had been.  The dead lay thick,
among them many who were young.  Out across the broken and trodden
fields there lay some scattered, sodden lumps upon the ground.
Franklin stood looking out over the fields, in the direction of the
town.  And there he saw a sight fitly to be called the ultimate horror
of all these things horrible that he had seen.

Over the fields of Louisburg there came a fearful sound, growing,
rising, falling, stopping the singing and the twitter of the birds.
Across the land there came a horrible procession, advancing with short,
uncertain, broken pauses--a procession which advanced, paused, halted,
broke into groups; advanced, paused, stopped, and stooped; a procession
which came with wailings and bitter cries, with wringing of hands, with
heads now and then laid upon the shoulders of others for support; a
procession which stooped uncertainly, horribly.  It was the women of
Louisburg coming to seek their slain--a sight most monstrous, most
terrible, unknown upon any field of civilized war, and unfit to be
tolerated even in the thought!  It is for men, who sow the fields of
battle, to attend also to the reaping.

Franklin stood at the inner edge of the earthworks, half hidden by a
little clump of trees.  It seemed to him that he could not well escape
without being seen, and he hesitated at this thought, Yet as he stood
it appeared that he must be an intruder even thus against his will.  He
saw approaching him, slowly but almost in direct line, two figures, an
older lady and a girl.  They came on, as did the others, always with
that slow, searching attitude, the walk broken with pauses and
stoopings.  The quest was but too obvious.  And even as Franklin gazed,
uncertain and unable to escape, it seemed apparent that the two had
found that which they had sought.  The girl, slightly in advance, ran
forward a few paces, paused, and then ran back.  "Oh, there! there!"
she cried.  And then the older woman took the girl's head upon her
bosom.  With bared head and his own hand at his eyes, Franklin hurried
away, hoping himself unseen, but bearing indelibly pictured on his
brain the scene of which he had been witness.  He wanted to cry out, to
halt the advancing columns which would soon be here, to tell them that
they must not come upon this field, made sacred by such woe.

The column of occupation had begun its movement.  Far as the eye could
see, the way was filled with the Northern troops now swinging forward
in the march.  Their course would be along this road, across these
earthworks, and over the fields between the wood and the town.  The
rattle and rumble of the advance began.  Upon the morning air there
rose the gallant and forgetful music which bade the soldier think not
of what had been or would be, but only of the present.  The bugles and
the cymbals sounded high and strong in the notes of triumph.  The game
was over.  The army was coming to take possession of that which it had
won.

It had won--what?  Could the answer be told by this chorus of woe which
arose upon the field of Louisburg?  Could the value of this winning be
summed by the estimate of these heaps of sodden, shapeless forms?  Here
were the fields, and here lay the harvest, the old and the young, the
wheat and the flower alike cut down.  Was this, then, what the
conqueror had won?

Near the intrenchment where the bitter close had been, and where there
was need alike for note of triumph, and forgetfulness, the band major
marshalled his music, four deep and forty strong, and swung out into
the anthem of the flag.  The march was now generally and steadily
begun.  The head of the column broke from the last cover of the wood
and came into full sight at the edge of the open country.  Thus there
came into view the whole panorama of the field, dotted with the slain
and with those who sought the slain.  The music of triumph was
encountered by the concerted voice of grief and woe.  There appeared
for the feet of this army not a mere road, a mere battlefield, but a
ground sacred, hedged high about, not rudely to be violated.

But the band major was a poet, a great man.  There came to him no order
telling him what he should do, but the thing was in his soul that
should be done.  There came to him, wafted from the field of sorrow, a
note which was command, a voice which sounded to him above the voices
of his own brasses, above the tapping of the kettledrums.  A gesture of
command, and the music ceased absolutely.  A moment, and it had resumed.

The forty black horses which made up this regimental band were the
pride of the division.  Four deep, forty strong, with arching necks,
with fore feet reaching far and drooping softly, each horse of the
famous cavalry band passed on out upon the field of Louisburg with such
carriage as showed it sensible of its mission.  The reins lay loose
upon their necks, but they kept step to the music which they felt.
Forty horses paced slowly forward, keeping step.  Forty trumpeters,
each man with his right hand aloft, holding his instrument, his left
hand at his side, bearing the cap which he had removed, rode on across
the field of Louisburg.  The music was no longer the hymn of triumph.

Softly and sadly, sweetly and soothingly, the trumpets sang a melody of
other days, an air long loved in the old-time South.  And Annie Laurie,
weeping, heard and listened, and wept the more, and blessed God for her
tears!




BOOK II

THE DAY OF THE BUFFALO


CHAPTER IV

BATTERSLEIGH OF THE RILE IRISH

Colonel Henry Battersleigh sat in his tent engaged in the composition
of a document which occasioned him concern.  That Colonel Battersleigh
should be using his tent as office and residence--for that such was the
fact even the most casual glance must have determined--was for him a
circumstance offering no special or extraordinary features.  His life
had been spent under canvas.  Brought up in the profession of arms, so
long as fighting and forage were good it had mattered little to him in
what clime he found his home.  He had fought with the English in India,
carried sabre in the Austrian horse, and on his private account drilled
regiments for the Grand Sultan, deep within the interior of a country
which knew how to keep its secrets.  When the American civil war began
he drifted to the newest scene of activity as metal to a magnet.
Chance sent him with the Union army, and there he found opportunity for
a cavalry command.  "A gintleman like Battersleigh of the Rile Irish
always rides," he said, and natural horseman as well as trained
cavalryman was Battersleigh, tall, lean, flat-backed, and martial even
under his sixty admitted years.  It was his claim that no Sudanese
spearsman or waddling assegai-thrower could harm him so long as he was
mounted and armed, and he boasted that no horse on earth could unseat
him.  Perhaps none ever had--until he came to the Plains.

For this was on the Plains.  When the bitter tide of war had ebbed,
Battersleigh had found himself again without a home.  He drifted with
the disintegrating bodies of troops which scattered over the country,
and in course of time found himself in the only portion of America
which seemed to him congenial.  Indeed, all the population was adrift,
all the anchors of established things torn loose.  In the distracted
South whole families, detesting the new ways of life now thrust upon
them, and seeing no way of retrieving their fortunes in the country
which had borne them, broke away entirely from old associations and
started on in the strange, vague American fashion of that day, in a
hope of finding a newer and perhaps a better country.  They moved by
rail, by boat, by wagon, in such way as they could.  The old Mountain
Road from Virginia was trodden by many a disheartened family who found
Kentucky also smitten, Missouri and Arkansas no better.  The West, the
then unknown and fascinating West, still remained beyond, a land of
hope, perhaps a land of refuge.  The men of the lower South, also
stirred and unsettled, moved in long columns to the West and Southwest,
following the ancient immigration into Texas.  The men of Texas,
citizens of a crude empire of unproved resources, likewise cast about
them restlessly.  Their cattle must some day find a market.  To the
north of them, still unknown and alluring, lay the new upper country
known as the West.

In the North the story was the same.  The young men, taken from the
fields and marts to the camps and marches of the war, could not easily
return to the staid ways of their earlier life.  From New England to
Michigan, from Michigan to Minnesota, many Northern families began to
move also toward that West which offered at least opportunity for
change.  Thus there poured into the West from many different
directions, but chiefly from two right-angling directions which
intersected on the Plains, a diverse population whose integers were
later with phenomenal swiftness to merge and blend.  As in the war the
boldest fought, so in emigration the boldest travelled, and the West
had the pick of the land.  In Illinois and Iowa, after the war had
ended, you might have seen a man in flapping blue army overcoat hewing
timber for fences on the forgotten farms, or guiding the plough across
the black reeking sod; but presently you must have also seen the
streams of white-topped wagons, sequel to the white tented fields,
moving on, pushing toward the West, the land of action and adventure,
the land of hope and promise.

As all America was under canvas, it was not strange that Colonel
Battersleigh should find his home in a tent, and that this tent should
be pitched upon the Western Plains.  Not that he had gone directly to
the West after the mustering out of his regiment.  To the contrary, his
first abode had been in the city of New York, where during his brief
stay he acquired a certain acquaintance.  Colonel Battersleigh was
always a striking figure, the more so by reason of his costume, which
was invariably the same.  His broad cavalry hat, his shapely varnished
boots, his gauntlets, his sweeping cloak, made him fairly historic
about the clubs.  His air, lofty, assured, yet ever suave, showed that
he classified himself cheerfully as being of the natural aristocracy of
the earth.  When Colonel Battersleigh had occasion to sign his name it
was worth a dinner to see the process, so seriously did he himself
regard it.  "Battersleigh"--so stood the name alone, unsupported and
self-sufficient.  Seeing which inscription in heavy black lines, many a
man wondered, considering that he had discovered an Old-World custom,
and joining in the belief of the owner of the name that all the world
must know the identity of Battersleigh.

What were the financial resources of Battersleigh after the cessation
of his pay as a cavalry officer not even his best friends could
accurately have told.  It was rumoured that he was the commissioner in
America of the London Times.  He was credited with being a Fellow of
the Royal Geographical Society.  That he had a history no one could
doubt who saw him come down the street with his broad hat, his sweeping
cloak, his gauntlets, his neatly varnished boots.

In reality Colonel Henry Battersleigh lived, during his city life, in a
small, a very small room, up more than one night of stairs.  This room,
no larger than a tent, was military in its neatness.  Battersleigh,
bachelor and soldier, was in nowise forgetful of the truth that
personal neatness and personal valour go well hand in hand.  The bed, a
very narrow one, had but meagre covering, and during the winter months
its single blanket rattled to the touch.  "There's nothing in the world
so warm as newspapers, me boy," said Battersleigh.  Upon the table,
which was a box, there was displayed always an invariable arrangement.
Colonel Battersleigh's riding whip (without which he was rarely seen in
public) was placed upon the table first.  Above the whip were laid the
gauntlets, crossed at sixty degrees.  On top of whip and gloves rested
the hat, indented never more nor less.  Beyond these, the personal
belongings of Battersleigh of the Rile Irish were at best few and
humble.  In the big city, busy with reviving commerce, there were few
who cared how Battersleigh lived.  It was a vagrant wind of March that
one day blew aside the cloak of Battersleigh as he raised his hat in
salutation to a friend--a vagrant wind, cynical and merciless, which
showed somewhat of the poverty with which Battersleigh had struggled
like a soldier and a gentleman.  Battersleigh, poor and proud, then
went out into the West.

The tent in which Colonel Battersleigh was now writing was an old one,
yellow and patched in places.  In size it was similar to that of the
bedroom in New York, and its furnishings were much the same.  A narrow
bunk held a bed over which there was spread a single blanket.  It was
silent in the tent, save for the scratching of the writer's pen; so
that now and then there might easily have been heard a faint rustling
as of paper.  Indeed, this rustling was caused by the small feet of the
prairie mice, which now and then ran over the newspaper which lay
beneath the blanket.  Battersleigh's table was again a rude one,
manufactured from a box.  The visible seats were also boxes, two or
three in number.  Upon one of these sat Battersleigh, busy at his
writing.  Upon the table lay his whip, gloves, and hat, in exactly the
same order as that which had been followed in the little chamber in the
city.  A strip of canvas made a carpet upon the hard earthen floor.  A
hanging cloth concealed a portion of the rear end of the tent.  Such
had been Battersleigh's quarters in many climes, under different flags,
sometimes perhaps more luxurious, but nevertheless punctiliously neat,
even when Fortune had left him servantless, as had happened now.
Colonel Battersleigh as he wrote now and then looked out of the open
door.  His vision reached out, not across a wilderness of dirty roads,
nor along a line of similar tents.  There came to his ear no neighing
of horses nor shouting of the captains, neither did there arise the din
of the busy, barren city.  He gazed out upon a sweet blue sky,
unfretted by any cloud.  His eye crossed a sea of faintly waving
grasses.  The liquid call of a mile-high mysterious plover came to him.
In the line of vision from the tent door there could be seen no token
of a human neighbourhood, nor could there be heard any sound of human
life.  The canvas house stood alone and apart.  Battersleigh gazed out
of the door as he folded his letter.  "It's grand, just grand," he
said.  And so he turned comfortably to the feeding of his mice, which
nibbled at his fingers intimately, as had many mice of many lands with
Battersleigh.




CHAPTER V

THE TURNING OF THE ROAD

At the close of the war Captain Edward Franklin returned to a shrunken
world.  The little Illinois village which had been his home no longer
served to bound his ambitions, but offered only a mill-round of duties
so petty, a horizon of opportunities so restricted, as to cause in his
mind a feeling of distress equivalent at times to absolute abhorrence.
The perspective of all things had changed.  The men who had once seemed
great to him in this little world now appeared in the light of a wider
judgment, as they really were--small, boastful, pompous, cowardly,
deceitful, pretentious.  Franklin was himself now a man, and a man
graduated from that severe and exacting school which so quickly matured
a generation of American youth.  Tall, finely built, well set up, with
the self-respecting carriage of the soldier and the direct eye of the
gentleman, there was a swing in his step not commonly to be found
behind a counter, and somewhat in the look of his grave face which
caused men to listen when he spoke.  As his hand had fitted naturally a
weapon, so his mind turned naturally to larger things than those
offered in these long-tilled fields of life.  He came back from the war
disillusionized, irreverent, impatient, and full of that surging
fretfulness which fell upon all the land.  Thousands of young men,
accustomed for years to energy, activity, and a certain freedom from
all small responsibility, were thrust back at once and asked to adjust
themselves to the older and calmer ways of peace.  The individual
problems were enormous in the aggregate.

Before Franklin, as before many other young men suddenly grown old,
there lay the necessity of earning a livelihood, of choosing an
occupation.  The paternal arm of the Government, which had guided and
controlled so long, was now withdrawn.  The young man must think for
himself.  He must choose his future, and work out his way therein alone
and unsupported.  The necessity of this choice, and the grave
responsibility assumed in choosing, confronted and oppressed Edward
Franklin as they did many another young man, whose life employment had
not been naturally determined by family or business associations.  He
stood looking out over the way of life.  There came to his soul that
indefinite melancholy known by the young man not yet acquainted with
the mysteries of life.  Franklin had been taken away at the threshold
of young manhood and crowded into a rude curriculum, which taught him
reserve as well as self-confidence, but which robbed him of part of the
natural expansion in experience which is the ordinary lot of youth.  He
had seen large things, and had become intolerant of the small.  He
wished to achieve life, success, and happiness at one assault, and
rebelled at learning how stubborn a resistance there lies in that
perpetual silent line of earth's innumerable welded obstacles.  He
grieved, but knew not why he grieved.  He yearned, but named no cause.

To this young man, ardent, energetic, malcontent, there appeared the
vision of wide regions of rude, active life, offering full outlet for
all the bodily vigour of a man, and appealing not less powerfully to
his imagination.  This West--no man had come back from it who was not
eager to return to it again!  For the weak and slothful it might do to
remain in the older communities, to reap in the long-tilled fields, but
for the strong, for the unattached, for the enterprising, this unknown,
unexplored, uncertain country offered a scene whose possibilities made
irresistible appeal.  For two years Franklin did the best he could at
reading law in a country office.  Every time he looked out of the
window he saw a white-topped wagon moving West.  Men came back and told
him of this West.  Men wrote letters from the West to friends who
remained in the East.  Presently these friends also, seized upon by
some vast impulse which they could not control, in turn arranged their
affairs and departed for the West.  Franklin looked about him at the
squat buildings of the little town, at the black loam of the monotonous
and uninviting fields, at the sordid, set and undeveloping lives around
him.  He looked also at the white wagons moving with the sun.  It
seemed to him that somewhere out in the vast land beyond the Missouri
there beckoned to him a mighty hand, the index finger of some mighty
force, imperative, forbidding pause.

The letter of Battersleigh to his friend Captain Franklin fell
therefore upon soil already well prepared.  Battersleigh and Franklin
had been friends in the army, and their feet had not yet wandered apart
in the days of peace.  Knowing the whimsicality of his friend, and
trusting not at all in his judgment of affairs, Franklin none the less
believed implicitly in the genuineness of his friendship, and counted
upon his comradeship as a rallying point for his beginning life in the
new land which he felt with strange conviction was to be his future
abiding place.  He read again and again the letter Battersleigh had
written him, which, in its somewhat formal diction and informal
orthography, was as follows:


"_To Capt. Edw. Franklin, Bloomsbury, Ill._

"MY DEAR NED: I have the honour to state to you that I am safely
arrived and well-established at this place, Ellisville, and am fully
disposed to remain.  At present the Railway is built no further than
this point, and the Labourers under charge of the Company Engineers
make the most of the population.  There is yet but one considerable
building completed, a most surprising thing to be seen in this wild
Region.  It is of stone and built as if to last forever.  It is large
as a Courthouse of one of your usual Towns, and might seem absurd in
this country did it not suggest a former civilization instead of one
yet to come.  It is full large enough for any Town of several thousand
people.  This is the property of the Co. that is building the Ry.  It
is said that the Co. will equip it fully, so that the country round
about may depend upon it for Rations.

"There is another building, intended also for an Hotel, but of a
different sort.  This is called the Cottage, and is much frequented by
fellows of the lower sort, the Labourers and others now stopping in
this vicinity.  It is the especial rendezvous of many men concerned
with the handling of Cattle.  I must tell you that this is to be a
great market for these Western Beeves.  Great numbers of these cattle
are now coming in to this country from the far South, and since the Ry.
is yet unable to transport these Animals as they arrive there is good
Numbers of them in the country hereabout, as well as many strange
persons curiously known as Cowboys or Cow-Punchers, which the same I
may call a purely Heathan sort.  These for the most part resort at the
Cottage Hotel, and there is no peace in the Town at this present
writing.

"For myself I have taken entry upon one hundred and sixty Acres Govt.
Land, and live a little way out from the Town.  Here I have my quarters
under tent, following example of all men, for as yet there are scarce a
dozen houses within fifty Miles.  I find much opportunity for studies
to be presented to the London Times, which paper as you know I
represent, and I prosecute with great hopes the business of the British
American Colonization Society, of which corporation I am resident Agent.

"I have Chosen this point because it was the furtherest one yet reached
by Rail.  Back of this, clean to the Missouri River, new Towns have
grown up in most wonderful fashion.  I have been advised that it is
highly desirable to be in at the beginning in this Country if one is to
stay in the Hunt, therefore I have come to a Town which has just Begun.
Believe me, dear Ned, it is the beginning of a World.  Such chances are
here, I am Sure as do not exist in any other Land, for behind this land
is all the Richer and older Parts, which are but waiting to pour money
and men hither so soon as the Ry. shall be Fully completed.  I have
heard of many men who have made Fortunes since the War.  It is truly a
rapid Land.

"I am persuaded, my dear boy, that this is the place for you to come.
There are an Hundred ways in which one may earn a Respectable living,
and I find here no Class Distinction.  It is an extraordinary fact that
no man and no profession ranks another here.  One man is quite good as
another.

"Of society I regret to say we can not as yet offer you much.  There is
yet but four women in the place and for the men a Part seem mostly busy
consuming Whisky at the Cottage, at which I wonder, for I have found
the Whisky very bad.  Let this not dishearten you, for many things will
change when the Ry. is completed.  We are to have Shops here, and I
understand this is to be the seat of the county.  A year from now, as I
am told, we shall have 2,000 Persons living here, and in five years
this will be a City.  Conceive the opportunity meantime.  The Cattle
business is bound to grow, and I am advised that all this land will
Ultimately be farmed and prove rich as that through which I Past in
coming out.  You are welcome, my dear Ned, as I am sure you know, to
half my blankets and rations during your stay here, however long same
may be, and I most cordially invite you to come out and look over this
Country, nor do I have the smallest doubt that it will seem to you
quite as it does to me, and I shall hope that we make a Citizen of you.

"Above all is this a man's country.  For sport it has no equal I have
ever seen, and as you know I have visited some Parts of the World.  The
Buffaloes is to be found by Millions within a few miles of this point,
and certain of the savidge Tribes still live but a short journey from
this point, though now the Army has pretty much Reduced them.
Antelopes there is all around in thousands, and many Wolves.  It is,
indeed, my boy, as I have told you, a country entirely new.  I have
travelled much, as you know, and am not so Young as yourself, but I
must say to you that your friend Batty feels like a boy again.  There
is something Strange in this air.  The sky is mostly clear, and the Air
very sweet.  The wind is steady but pleasant, and a man may live in
comfort the year round as I am told.  I am but new here as yet myself,
but am fully disposed, as they say in the strange language here, to
drive my Stake.  I want you, my dear boy, also to drive Yours beside
me, and to that Effect I beg to extend you whatever Aid may lie in my
Power.

"Hoping that you may receive this communication duly, and make reply to
Same, and hoping above all things that I may soon meet again my
Companion of the 47th., I beg to subscribe myself, my dear boy, ever
your Obdt. & Affect. Friend,

"BATTERSLEIGH.

"P.S.--Pray Herild your advent by a letter & bring about 4 lbs. or 5
lbs. of your Favourite Tea, as I am Short of Same."


The letter ended with Battersleigh's best flourish.  Franklin turned it
over again and again in his hand and read it more than once as he
pondered upon its message.  "Dear old fellow," he said; "he's a good
deal of a Don Quixote, but he never forgets a friend.  Buffalo and
Indians, railroads and hotels--it must at least be a land of contrasts!"




CHAPTER VI

EDWARD FRANKLIN, LAWYER

Edward Franklin had taken up his law studies in the office of Judge
Bradley, the leading lawyer of the little village of Bloomsbury, where
Franklin was born, and where he had spent most of his life previous to
the time of his enlistment in the army.  Judge Bradley was successful,
as such matters go in such communities, and it was his open boast that
he owed his success to himself and no one else.  He had no faith in
such mythical factors as circumstances in the battle of life.  This is
the common doctrine of all men who have arrived, and Judge Bradley had
long since arrived, in so far as the possibilities of his surroundings
would admit.  His was the largest law library in the town.  He had the
most imposing offices--a suite of three rooms, with eke a shiny
base-burner in the reception room.  His was one of the three silk hats
in the town.

Thirty-five years earlier, a raw youth from old Vermont, Hollis N.
Bradley had walked into the embryonic settlement of Bloomsbury with a
single law book under his arm, and naught but down upon his chin.  He
pleaded his first cause before a judge who rode circuit over a
territory now divided into three Congressional districts.  He won his
first case, for his antagonist was even more ignorant than he.  As
civilization advanced, he defended fewer men for stealing hogs, and
more for murder and adultery.  His practice grew with the growth of the
population of the country about him.  He was elected county attorney,
local counsel for the railroad, and judge of the circuit court.  He was
mentioned for gubernatorial honours, and would perhaps have received
the party nomination but for the breaking out of the civil war.  Not
fancying the personal risks of the army, he hired a substitute, and
this sealed his political fate; for Illinois at that time did not put
in power men who sent substitutes to the war.  None the less, the lands
and moneys of the most prominent lawyer of the place kept him secure,
and human memories are short; so that, when Edward Franklin and others
of the young men of Bloomsbury returned from the war, they saw upon the
streets of the little town, as they had seen before they went away, the
tall form, the portly front, the smooth-shaven face, and the tall silk
hat of Judge Hollis N. Bradley, who had in every sense survived the war.

It was an immemorial custom in Bloomsbury for the youth who had
aspirations for a legal career to "read law" in Judge Bradley's office.
Two of his students had dropped their books to take up rifles, and they
came not back to their places.  They were forgotten, save once a year,
upon Decoration Day, when Judge Bradley made eloquent tribute above
their graves.  Upon such times Judge Bradley always shed tears, and
always alluded to the tears with pride.  Indeed, his lachrymal ability
was something of which he had much right to be proud, it being well
known in the legal profession that one's fees are in direct proportion
to his ability to weep.  Judge Bradley could always weep at the right
time before a Jury, and this facility won him many a case.  Through no
idle whim had public sentiment, even after the incident of the
substitute, confirmed him in his position as the leading lawyer of
Bloomsbury.

It was therefore predetermined that Edward Franklin should go into the
office of Judge Bradley to begin his law studies, after he had decided
that the profession of the law was the one likely to offer him the best
career.  In making his decision, Franklin was actuated precisely as are
many young men who question themselves regarding their career.  He saw
the average results of the lives of others in a given calling, and
conceived, without consulting in most jealous scrutiny his own natural
fitnesses and preferences, that he might well succeed in that calling
because he saw others so succeeding.  Already there were two dozen
lawyers in Bloomsbury, and it was to be questioned whether they all did
so well as had Judge Bradley in the hog-stealing epoch of the local
history.  Yet it was necessary for him to take up something by way of
occupation, and it resolved itself somewhat into a matter of
cancellation.  For the profession of medicine he had a horror, grounded
upon scenes of contract surgery upon the fields of battle.  The
ministry he set aside.  From commerce, as he had always seen it in his
native town, twelve hours a day of haggling and smirking, he shrank
with all the impulses of his soul.  The abject country newspaper gave
him no inkling of that fourth estate which was later to spring up in
the land.  Arms he loved, but there was now no field for arms.  There
were no family resources to tide him over the season of experiment,
and, indeed, but for a brother and a sister, who lived in an adjoining
farming community, he had no relatives to be considered in his plans.
Perforce, then, Franklin went into the law, facing it somewhat as he
had the silent abattis, as with a duty to perform.  Certainly, of all
students, Judge Bradley had never had a handsomer, a more mature, or a
more reluctant candidate than this same Edward Franklin, late captain
in the United States Army, now getting well on into his twenties,
grave, silent, and preoccupied, perhaps a trine dreamy.  He might or
might not be good material for a lawyer; as to that, Judge Bradley did
not concern himself.  Young men came into his office upon their own
responsibility.

It was one of the unvarying rules of Judge Bradley's office, and indeed
this was almost the only rule which he imposed, that the law student
within his gates, no matter what his age or earlier servitude, should
each morning sweep out the office, and should, when so requested, copy
out any law papers needing to be executed in duplicate.  So long as a
student did these things, he was welcome as long as he cared to stay.
The judge never troubled himself about the studies of his pupil, never
asked him a question, indeed never even told him what books it might be
best to read, unless this advice were asked voluntarily by the student
himself.  He simply gave the candidate a broom, a chair, and the
freedom of the library, which latter was the best law library in the
town.  What more could one ask who contemplated a career at law?  It
was for him to work out his own salvation; and to sweep the stairs each
morning.

Edward Franklin accepted his seat in Judge Bradley's office without any
reservations, and he paid his daily fee of tenure as had all the other
students before him, scorning not the broom.  Indeed, his conscience in
small things augured well, for it was little cousin to his conscience
in great things.  Ardent, ambitious, and resolute, he fell upon
Blackstone, Chitty, and Kent, as though he were asked to carry a
redoubt.  He read six, eight, ten hours a day, until his head buzzed,
and he forgot what he had read.  Then at it all over again, with teeth
set.  Thus through more than a year he toiled, lashed forward by his
own determination, until at length he began to see some of the
beautiful first principles of the law--that law, once noble and
beneficent, now degraded and debased; once designed for the protection
of the individual, now used by society as the instrument for the
individual's extermination.  So in his second year Franklin fared
somewhat beyond principles merely, and got into notes and bills, torts,
contracts, and remedies.  He learned with a shiver how a promise might
legally be broken, how a gift should be regarded with suspicion, how a
sacred legacy might be set aside.  He read these things again and
again, and forced them into his brain, so that they might never be
forgotten; yet this part of the law he loved not so much as its grand
first principles of truth and justice.

One morning, after Franklin had finished his task of sweeping down the
stairs, he sat him down by the window with Battersleigh's letter in his
hand; for this was now the third day since he had received this letter,
and it had been in his mind more vividly present than the pages of the
work on contracts with which he was then occupied.  It was a bright,
fresh morning in the early spring.  A little bird was singing somewhere
near the window.  From where Franklin sat he could see the green grass
just starting, over in the courthouse yard.  A long and lazy street lay
in perspective before the window, and along it, out beyond the confines
of the town, there reached the flat monotony of the dark prairie soil.
The leaves of the soft maples were beginning to show over there, near
the village church.  A dog crossed the street, pausing midway of the
crossing to scratch his ear.  The cart of the leading grocer was
hitched in front of his store, and an idle citizen or two paused near
by to exchange a morning greeting.  All the little, uneventful day was
beginning, as it had begun so many times before here in this little,
uneventful town, where the world was finished, never more to change.
Franklin shuddered.  Was this, then, to be his life?  He turned to the
rows of scuffed-backed law books on their shelves.  Then he turned
again to his letter, and to the window, and to the birds and the grass.
He caught himself noting how long the dog's hind leg looked, how
impossible the angle between the fore leg and the spine, as it half sat
in flea-compelled contortions.

There came a regular tread upon the stair, as there had always for
years come at this hour of half past seven in the morning, rain or
shine.  Judge Bradley entered, tall, portly, smooth shaven, his silk
hat pushed back upon his brow, as was his fashion.  Franklin turned to
make the usual morning salutation.

"Good-morning, Ned," said the Judge, affably.

"Good-morning, Judge," said Franklin.  "I hope you are well."

"Yes, thank you.  Nothing ever the matter with me.  How are things
coming?"

"Oh, all right, thank you."

This was the stereotyped form of the daily greeting between the two.
Judge Bradley turned as usual to his desk, but, catching sight of the
letter still held in Franklin's hand, remarked carelessly:

"Got a letter from your girl?"

"Not so lucky," said Franklin.  "From a friend."

Silence resulted.  Judge Bradley opened his desk, took off his coat and
hung it on a nail, after his custom, thereafter seating himself at his
desk, with the official cough which signified that the campaign of the
day had begun.  He turned over the papers for a moment, and remarked
absent-mindedly, and more to be polite than because the matter
interested him, "Friend, eh?"

"Yes," said Franklin, "friend, out West"; and both relapsed again into
silence.  Franklin once more fell to gazing out of the window, but at
length turned toward the desk and pulled over his chair to a closer
speaking distance.

"Judge Bradley," said he, "I shouldn't wonder if I could pass my
examination for the bar."

"Well, now," said the Judge, "I hope you can.  That's nice.  Goin' to
hang out your own shingle, eh?"

"I might, if I got my license."

"Oh, that's easy," replied the other; "it's mostly a matter of form.
The court'll appoint a committee of three members of the bar, an'
they'll tell you when they want to see you for the circus--some evening
after court.  They'll ask you where you've been readin' law, an' for
how long.  If you tell 'em you've read in my office, it'll be all
right.  I never knew 'em to fail to pass a student that had read with
me--it wouldn't be professional courtesy to me.  You'll go through all
right, don't worry.  You want to post up on a few such questions as,
'What is the law?' and 'What are the seven--or is it eight?--forms of
actions at law?'  Then you want to be able to answer on 'What was the
rule in Shelley's Case?'  There's sure to be some fool or other that'll
ask you that question, just to show off--I don't remember what the
d----d thing is myself--and you'll never hear of it again; but you get
fixed to answer them three questions, an' you can be admitted to the
bar all right anywhere in the State of Illinois, or leastways in this
county.  Then it's customary for a fellow just admitted to the bar to
have a little jug around at his office before court adjourns--just to
comply with a professional custom, you know.  No trouble about it--not
in the least.  I'll see you through."

"I am clear in my own mind that I don't know much about the law," said
Franklin, "and I should not think of going up for examination if that
ended my studies in the profession.  If I were intending to go into
practice here, sir, or near by, I should not think of applying for
admission for at least another year.  But the fact is, I'm thinking of
going away."

"Goin' away?"  Judge Bradley straightened up, and his expression if
anything was one of relief.  He had had his own misgivings about this
grave-faced and mature young man should he go into the practice at the
Bloomsbury bar.  It was well enough to encourage such possibilities to
take their test in some other locality.  Judge Bradley therefore became
more cheerful.  "Goin' away, eh?" he said.  "Where to?"

"Out West," said Franklin, unconsciously repeating the phrase which was
then upon the lips of all the young men of the country.

"Out West, eh?" said the judge, with still greater cheerfulness.
"That's right, that's right.  That's the place to go to, where you can
get a better chance.  I came West in my day myself, though it isn't
West now; an' that's how I got my start.  There's ten chances out there
to where there's one here, an' you'll get better pay for what you do.
I'd advise it, sir--I'd advise it; yes, indeed."

"I think it will be better," said Franklin calmly.

"Hate to lose you," said the judge, politely--"hate to lose you, of
course, but then a young man's got to make his way; he's got to get his
start."

Franklin sat silent for a few moments, musingly staring out of the
window, and listening, without active consciousness of the fact, to the
music of the singing bird which came from somewhere without.  At length
he rose and turned toward the elder man.

"If you please, judge," said he, "get the committee appointed for
to-night if you can.  I'll take the examination now."

"Yes?  You are in a hurry!"

"Then to-morrow I'll go over and say good-bye to my sister; and the
next day I think I'll follow the wagons West.  I've not much to put in
a wagon, so I can go by rail.  The road's away west of the Missouri
now, and my letter comes from the very last station, at the head of the
track."

"So?" said the Judge.  "Well, that ought to be far enough, sure, if you
go clean to the jumping-off place.  Goin' to leave your sweetheart
behind you, eh?"

Franklin laughed.  "Well, I don't need face that hardship," said he,
"for I haven't any sweetheart."

"Ought to have," said the judge.  "You're old enough.  I was just
twenty-two years old when I was married, an' I had just one hundred
dollars to my name.  I sent back to Vermont for my sweetheart, an' she
came out, an' we were married right here.  I couldn't afford to go back
after her, so she came out to me.  An' I reckon," added he, with a
sense of deep satisfaction, "that she hasn't never regretted it."

"Well, I don't see how love and law can go together," said Franklin
sagely.

"They don't," said the judge tersely.  "When you get so that you see a
girl's face a-settin' on the page of your law book in front of you, the
best thing you can do is to go marry the girl as quick as the Lord'll
let you.  It beats the world, anyhow, how some fellows get mixed up,
and let a woman hinder 'em in their work.  Now, in my case, I never had
any such a trouble."

"And I hope I never shall," said Franklin.

"Well, see that you don't.  You hit it close when you said that love
an' law don't go together.  Don't try to study 'em both at the same
time; that's my advice, an' I don't charge you anything for it, seeing
it's you."  With a grin at his little jest, Judge Bradley turned back
to his desk and to his little world.




CHAPTER VII

THE NEW WORLD

Franklin crossed the Missouri River, that dividing stream known to a
generation of Western men simply as "the River," and acknowledged as the
boundary between the old and the new, the known and the untried.  He
passed on through well-settled farming regions, dotted with prosperous
towns.  He moved still with the rolling wheels over a country which
showed only here and there the smoke of a rancher's home.  Not even yet
did the daring flight of the railway cease.  It came into a land wide,
unbounded, apparently untracked by man, and seemingly set beyond the
limit of man's wanderings.  Far out in the heart of this great gray
wilderness lay the track-end of this railroad pushing across the
continent.  When Franklin descended from the rude train he needed no one
to tell him he had come to Ellisville.  He was at the limit, the edge,
the boundary!  "Well, friend," said the fireman, who was oiling the
engine as he passed, and who grinned amiably as he spoke, "you're sure at
the front now."

Franklin had not advised his friend Battersleigh of his intended arrival,
but as he looked about him he saw that he had little need for any guide.

Ellisville as an actual town did not yet exist.  A rude shanty or two and
a line of tents indicated the course of a coming street.  The two hotels
mentioned by Battersleigh were easily recognised, and indeed not to be
evaded.  Out of the middle of this vast, treeless plain the great stone
hotel arose, with no visible excuse or palliation, a deliberate affront
to the solitude which lay far and wide about.  Even less within the
bounds of reason appeared the wooden building which Franklin learned was
the Cottage.  "Surely," thought he, "if the railroad company had been mad
in building the stone hotel, much worse must have been the man who
erected this rambling wooden structure, hoping for customers who must
come a thousand miles."  Yet was this latter mad act justified before his
very eyes.  The customers had come.  More than forty cow ponies stood in
the Cottage corral or in the street near by.  Afar there swelled the
sound of morning revelries.

Franklin wanted breakfast, and instinctively turned toward the stone
hotel at the depot, where he learned were quartered the engineers and
contractors on the railroad work.  He seated himself at one of the many
tables in the vast, barren dining room.  Half the attendants were haughty
young women, and half rather slovenly young men.

Franklin fell under the care of one of the latter, who greeted him with
something of the affection of an old acquaintance.  Coming to the side of
his chair, and throwing an arm carelessly across Franklin's shoulder, the
waiter asked in a confidential tone of voice, "Well, Cap, which'll you
have, hump or tongue?"  Whereby Franklin discovered that he was now upon
the buffalo range, and also at the verge of a new etiquette.

After breakfast Franklin paused for a moment at the hotel office, almost
as large and empty as the dining room.  Different men now and then came
and passed him by, each seeming to have some business of his own.  The
clerk at the hotel asked him if he wanted to locate some land.  Still
another stranger, a florid and loosely clad young man with a mild blue
eye, approached him and held some converse.

"Mornin', friend," said the young man.

"Good-morning," said Franklin.

"I allow you're just in on the front," said the other.

"Yes," said Franklin, "I came on the last train."

"Stay long?"

"Well, as to that," said Franklin, "I hardly know, but I shall look
around a bit."

"I didn't know but maybe you'd like to go south o' here, to Plum Centre.
I run the stage line down there, about forty-six miles, twict a week.
That's my livery barn over there--second wooden building in the town.
Sam's my name; Sam Poston."

"I never heard of Plum Centre," said Franklin, with some amusement.  "Is
it as large a place as this?"

"Oh, no," said Sam hurriedly, "not nigh as large as this, but it's a good
town, all right.  Lots on the main street there sold for three hundred
dollars last week.  You see, old man Plum has got it figgered out that
his town is right in the middle of the United States, ary way you measure
it.  We claim the same thing for Ellisville, and there you are.  We've
got the railroad, and they've got my stage line.  There can't no one tell
yet which is goin' to get the bulge on the other.  If you want to go down
there, come over and I'll fix you up."

Franklin replied that he would be glad to do so in case he had the need,
and was about to turn away.  He was interrupted by the other, who stopped
him with an explosive "Say!"

"Yes," said Franklin.

"Did you notice that girl in the dining room, pony-built like, slick,
black-haired, dark eyes--wears glasses?  Say, that's the smoothest girl
west of the river.  She's waitin', in the hotel here, but say"
(confidentially), "she taught school onct--yes, sir.  You know, I'm gone
on that girl the worst way.  If you get a chanct to put in a word for me,
you do it, won't you?"

Franklin was somewhat impressed with the swiftness of acquaintanceships
and of general affairs in this new land, but he retained his own
tactfulness and made polite assurances of aid should it become possible.

"I'd be mightily obliged," said his new-found friend.  "Seems like I lose
my nerve every time I try to say a word to that girl.  Now, I plum forgot
to ast you which way you was goin'.  Do you want a team?"

"Thank you," said Franklin, "but I hardly think so.  I want to find my
friend Colonel Battersleigh, and I understand he lives not very far away."

"Oh, you mean old Batty.  Yes, he lives just out south a little
ways--Section No. 9, southeast quarter.  I suppose you could walk."

"I believe I will walk, if you don't mind," said Franklin.  "It seems
very pleasant, and I am tired of riding."

"All right, so long," said Sam.  "Don't you forgit what I told you about
that Nora girl."

Franklin passed on in the direction which had been pointed out to him,
looking about him at the strange, new country, in which he felt the
proprietorship of early discovery.  He drew in deep breaths of an air
delightfully fresh, squaring his shoulders and throwing up his head
instinctively as he strode forward.  The sky was faultlessly clear.  The
prospect all about him, devoid as it was of variety, was none the less
abundantly filling to the eye.  Far as the eye could reach rolled an
illimitable, tawny sea.  The short, harsh grass near at hand he
discovered to be dotted here and there with small, gay flowers.  Back of
him, as he turned his head, he saw a square of vivid green, which water
had created as a garden spot of grass and flowers at the stone hotel.  He
did not find this green of civilization more consoling or inspiring than
the natural colour of the wild land that lay before him.  For the first
time in his life he looked upon the great Plains, and for the first time
felt their fascination.  There came to him a subtle, strange
exhilaration.  A sensation of confidence, of certainty, arose in his
heart.  He trod as a conqueror upon a land new taken.  All the earth
seemed happy and care-free.  A meadow lark was singing shrilly high up in
the air; another lark answered, clanking contentedly from the grass,
whence in the bright air its yellow breast showed brilliantly.

As Franklin was walking on, busy with the impressions of his new world,
he became conscious of rapid hoof-beats coming up behind him, and turned
to see a horseman careering across the open in his direction, with no
apparent object in view beyond that of making all the noise possible to
be made by a freckled-faced cowboy who had been up all night, but still
had some vitality which needed vent.

"Eeeeee-yow-heeeeee!" yelled the cowboy, both spurring and reining his
supple, cringing steed.  "Eeeeeee-yip-yeeeee!"  Thus vociferating, he
rode straight at the footman, with apparently the deliberate wish to ride
him down.  He wist not that the latter had seen cavalry in his day, and
was not easily to be disconcerted, and, finding that he failed to create
a panic, he pulled up with the pony's nose almost over Franklin's
shoulder.

"Hello, stranger," cried the rider, cheerfully; "where are you goin',
this bright an' happy mornin'?"

Franklin was none too pleased at the method of introduction selected by
this youth, but a look at his open and guileless face forbade the thought
of offence.  The cowboy sat his horse as though he was cognizant of no
such creature beneath him.  His hand was held high and wabbling as he bit
off a chew from a large tobacco plug the while he jogged alongside.

Franklin made no immediate reply, and the cowboy resumed.

"Have a chaw?" he said affably, and looked surprised when Franklin
thanked him but did not accept.

"Where's yore hoss, man?" asked the new-comer with concern.  "Where you
goin', headin' plum south, an' 'thout no hoss?"

"Oh," said Franklin, smiling, "I'm not going far; only over south a mile
or so.  I want to find a friend.  Colonel Battersleigh.  I think his
place is only a mile or so from here."

"Sure," said the cowboy.  "Old Batty--I know him.  He taken up a quarter
below here.  Ain't got his shack up yet.  But say, that's a full mile
from yer.  You ain't goin' to walk a mile, are you?"

"I've walked a good many thousand miles," said Franklin, "and I shouldn't
wonder if I could get over this one."

"They's all kind of fools in the world," said the rider sagely, and with
such calm conviction in his tone that again Franklin could not take
offence.  They progressed a time in silence.

"Say," said the cowboy, after a time--"say, I reckon I kin lick you."

"Do you think so?" said Franklin calmly, pulling up his shoulders and
feeling no alarm.

"Shorely I do," said the other; "I reckon I kin lick you, er beat you
shootin', er throw you down."

"Friend," said Franklin judicially, "I have a good many doubts about your
being able to do all that.  But before we take it up any further I would
like to ask you something."

"Well, whut?"

"I'd just like to ask you what makes you tell me that, when I'm a perfect
stranger to you, and when perhaps you may never see me again?"

"Well, now," said the cowboy, pushing back his hat and scratching his
head thoughtfully, "blame if I know why, but I just 'lowed I could,
sorter.  An' I _kin_!"

"But why?"

"Say, you're the d----dest feller I ever did see.  You got to have a
reason fer everything on earth?"  His tone became more truculent.  "First
place, 'f I didn't have no other reason, I kin lick ary man on earth that
walks."

"Friend," said Franklin, "get down off that horse, and I'll give you a
little wrestle to see who rides.  What's your name, anyhow?"

"Whoa!" said the other.  "Name's Curly." He was on the ground as he said
this last, and throwing the bridle over the horse's head.  The animal
stood as though anchored.  Curly cast his hat upon the ground and trod
upon it in a sort of ecstasy of combat.  He rushed at Franklin without
argument or premeditation.

The latter had not attended country school for nothing.  Stepping lightly
aside, he caught his ready opponent as he passed, and, with one arm about
his neck, gave him a specimen of the "hip-lock" which sent him in the air
over his own shoulder.  The cowboy came down much in a heap, but
presently sat up, his hair somewhat rumpled and sandy.  He rubbed his
head and made sundry exclamations of surprise.  "Huh!" said he.  "Well,
I'm d----d!  Now, how you s'pose that happened?  You kain't do that
again," he said to Franklin, finally.

"Shouldn't wonder if I could," said Franklin, laughing.

"Look out fer me--I'm a-comin'!" cried Curly.

They met more fairly this time, and Franklin found that he had an
antagonist of little skill in the game of wrestling, but of a surprising
wiry, bodily strength.  Time and again the cowboy writhed away from the
hold, and came back again with the light of battle in his eye.  It was
only after several moments that he succumbed, this time to the insidious
"grapevine."  He fell so sharply that Franklin had difficulty in breaking
free in order not to fall upon him.  The cowboy lay prone for a moment,
then got up and dusted off his hat.

"Mount, friend," said he, throwing the bridle back over the horse's neck
without other word.  "You done it fair!"

"I'll tell you what we'll do," said Franklin, extending his hand.  "We'll
just both walk along together a way, if you don't mind.  I'll get me a
horse pretty soon.  You see, I'm a new man here--just got in this
morning, and I haven't had time to look around much yet.  I thought I'd
go out and meet my friend, and perhaps then we could talk over such
things together."

"Shore," said Curly.  "Why didn't you tell me?  Say, ole Batty, he's
crazy to ketch a whole lot o' hosses out'n a band o' wild hosses down to
the Beaver Creek.  He always a-wantin' me to help him ketch them hosses.
Say, he's got a lot o' sassafiddity, somethin' like that, an' he says
he's goin' to soak some corn in that stuff an' set it out fer hosses.
Says it'll make 'em _loco_, so'st you kin go right up an' rope 'em.  Now,
ain't that the d----dest fool thing yet?  Say, some o' these pilgrims
that comes out here ain't got sense enough to last over night."

"Battersleigh is fond of horses," said Franklin, "and he's a rider, too."

"That's so," admitted Curly.  "He kin ride.  You orter see him when he
gits his full outfit on, sword _an_' pistol by his side, uh-huh!"

"He has a horse, then?"

"Has a boss?  Has a hoss--has--what?  Why, o' course he has a boss.  Is
there anybody that ain't got a hoss?"

"Well, I haven't," said Franklin.

"You got this one," said Curly.

"How?" said Frank, puzzled.

"Why, you won him."

"Oh, pshaw!" said Franklin.  "Nonsense!  I wasn't wrestling for your
horse, only for a ride.  Besides, I didn't have any horse put up against
yours.  I couldn't lose anything."

"That's so," said Curly.  "I hadn't thought of that.  Say, you seem like
a white sort o' feller.  Tell you what I'll just do with you.  O' course,
I was thinkin' you'd win the whole outfit, saddle an' all.  I think a
heap o' my saddle, an' long's you ain't got no saddle yet that you have
got used to, like, it don't make much difference to you if you get
another saddle.  But you just take this here hoss along.  No, that's all
right.  I kin git me another back to the corral, just as good as this
one.  Jim Parsons, feller on the big bunch o' cows that come up from the
San Marcos this spring, why, he got killed night before last.  I'll just
take one o' his hosses, I reckon.  I kin fix it so'st you kin git his
saddle, if you take a notion to it."

Franklin looked twice to see if there was affectation in this calm
statement, but was forced, with a certain horror, to believe that his new
acquaintance spoke of this as a matter of fact, and as nothing startling.
He had made no comment, when he was prevented from doing so by the
exclamation of the cowboy, who pointed out ahead.

"There's Batty's place," said he, "an' there's Batty himself.  Git up,
quick; git up, an' ride in like a gentleman.  It's bad luck to walk."

Franklin laughed, and, taking the reins, swung himself into the saddle
with the ease of the cavalry mount, though with the old-fashioned grasp
at the cantle, with the ends of the reins in his right hand.

"Well, that's a d----d funny way gittin' on top of a hoss," said Curly.
"Are you 'fraid the saddle's goin' to git away from you?  Better be
'fraid 'bout the hoss.--Git up, Bronch!"

He slapped the horse on the hip with his hat, and gave the latter a whirl
in the air with a shrill "Whoooop-eee!" which was all that remained
needful to set the horse off on a series of wild, stiff-legged
plunges--the "bucking" of which Franklin had heard so much; a manoeuvre
peculiar to the half-wild Western horses, and one which is at the first
experience a desperately difficult one for even a skilful horseman to
overcome.  It perhaps did not occur to Curly that he was inflicting any
hardship upon the newcomer, and perhaps he did not really anticipate what
followed on the part either of the horse or its rider.  Had Franklin not
been a good rider, and accustomed to keeping his head while sitting
half-broken mounts, he must have suffered almost instantaneous defeat in
this sudden encounter.  The horse threw his head down far between his
fore legs at the start, and then went angling and zigzagging away over
the hard ground in a wild career of humpbacked antics, which jarred
Franklin to the marrow of his bones.  The air became scintillant and
luminously red.  His head seemed filled with loose liquid, his spine
turned into a column of mere gelatine.  The thudding of the hoofs was so
rapid and so punishing to his senses that for a moment he did not realize
where he actually was.  Yet with the sheer instinct of horsemanship he
clung to the saddle in some fashion, until finally he was fairly forced
to relax the muscular strain, and so by accident fell into the secret of
the seat--loose, yielding, not tense and strung.

"Go it, go it--whooop-e-e-e!" cried Curly, somewhere out in a dark world.
"Ee-eikee-hooo!  Set him fair, pardner!  Set him fair, now!  Let go that
leather!  Ride him straight up!  That's right!"

Franklin had small notion of Curly's locality, but he heard his voice,
half taunting and half encouraging, and calling on all his pluck as he
saw some hope of a successful issue, he resolved to ride it out if it lay
within him so to do.  He was well on with his resolution when he heard
another voice, which he recognised clearly.

"Good boy, Ned," cried out this voice heartily, though likewise from some
locality yet vague.  "R-ride the divil to a finish, me boy!  Git up his
head, Ned!  Git up his head!  The murdering haythin' brute!  Kill him!
Ride him out!"

And ride him out Franklin did, perhaps as much by good fortune as by
skill, though none but a shrewd horseman would have hoped to do this
feat.  Hurt and jarred, he yet kept upright, and at last he did get the
horse's head up and saw the wild performance close as quickly as it had
begun.  The pony ceased his grunting and fell into a stiff trot, with
little to indicate his hidden pyrotechnic quality.  Franklin whirled him
around and rode up to where Battersleigh and Curly had now joined.  He
was a bit pale, but he pulled himself together well before he reached
them and dismounted with a good front of unconcern.  Battersleigh grasped
his hand in both his own and greeted him with a shower of welcomes and of
compliments.  Curly slapped him heartily upon the shoulders.

"You're all right, pardner," said he.  "You're the d----dest best pilgrim
that ever struck this place, an' I kin lick ary man that says differ'nt.
He's yore horse now, shore."

"And how do ye do, Ned?  God bless ye!" said Battersleigh a moment later,
after things had become more tranquil, the horse now falling to cropping
at the grass with a meekness of demeanour which suggested innocence or
penitence, whichever the observer chose.  "I'm glad to see ye; glad as
ivver I was in all me life to see a livin' soul!  Why didn't ye tell ye
was coming and not come ridin' like a murderin' Cintaur--but ay, boy,
ye're a rider--worthy the ould Forty-siventh--yis, more, I'll say ye
might be a officer in the guards, or in the Rile Irish itself, b'gad,
yes, sir!--Curly, ye divvil, what do ye mean by puttin' me friend on such
a brute, him the first day in the land?  And, Ned, how are ye goin' to
like it here, me boy?"

Franklin wiped his forehead as he replied to Battersleigh's running fire
of salutations.

"Well, Battersleigh," he said, "I must say I've been pretty busy ever
since I got here, and so far as I can tell at this date, I'm much
disposed to think this is a strange and rather rapid sort of country
you've got out here."

"Best d----n pilgrim ever hit this rodeo!" repeated Curly, with
conviction.

"Shut up, Curly, ye divvil!" said Battersleigh.  "Come into the house,
the both of you.  It's but a poor house, but ye're welcome.--An' welcome
ye are, too, Ned, me boy, to the New World."




CHAPTER VIII

THE BEGINNING

Franklin's foot took hold upon the soil of the new land.  His soul
reached out and laid hold upon the sky, the harsh flowers, the rasping
wind.  He gave, and he drank in.  Thus grew the people of the West.

The effect upon different men of new and crude conditions is as various
as the individuals themselves.  To the dreamer, the theorist, the man
who looks too far forward into the future or too far back into the
past, the message of the environment may fall oppressively; whereas to
the practical man, content to live in the present and to devise
immediate remedies for immediate ills, it may come sweet as a challenge
upon reserves of energy.  The American frontier subsequent to the civil
war was so vast, yet so rapid, in its motive that to the weak or the
unready it was merely appalling.  The task was that of creating an
entire new world.  So confronted, some sat down and wept, watching the
fabric grow under the hands of others.  Some were strong, but knew not
how to apply their strength; others were strong but slothful.  The man
of initiative, of executive, of judgment and resource, was the one who
later came to rule.  There was no one class, either of rich or of poor,
who supplied all these men.  The man who had been poor in earlier life
might set to work at once in bettering himself upon the frontier; and
by his side, equally prosperous, might be one who in his earlier days
had never needed to earn a dollar nor to thrash a fellow-man.
Civilization at its later stages drives the man into a corner.  In its
beginning it summons this same man out of the corner and asks him to
rely upon himself for the great and the small things of life, thus
ultimately developing that sturdy citizen who knows the value of the
axiom, "_Ubi bene, ibi patria_."  The great deeds, the great dreams
become possible for nation or for individual only through the constant
performance of small deeds.  "For it must be remembered that life
consists not of a series of illustrious actions or elegant enjoyments.
The greater part of our time passes in compliance with necessities, in
the performance of daily duties, in the removal of small
inconveniences, in the procurement of petty pleasures; and we are well
or ill at ease as the main stream of life glides on smoothly, or is
ruffled by small obstructions and frequent interruptions."

Such philosophy was for Franklin unformulated.  Care sat not on his
heart.  There were at first no problems in all the world for him.  It
was enough to feel this warm sun upon the cheek, to hear the sigh of
the wind in the grasses, to note the nodding flowers and hear the larks
busy with their joys.  The stirring of primeval man was strong, that
magnificent rebellion against bonds which has, after all, been the
mainspring of all progress, however much the latter may be regulated by
many intercurrent wheels.  It was enough for Franklin to be alive.  He
stood straight, he breathed deep.  This infection was in his blood.

"Think you, Ned, me boy," said Battersleigh, one day, as they stood at
the tent door--"think you, this old gray world has been inhabited a
million years, by billions of people, and yet here we have a chance to
own a part of it, each for himself, here, at this last minute of the
world's life!  Do you mind that, what it means?  Never you think a
chance like that'll last forever.  Yet here we are, before the law, and
almost antedatin' the social ijee.  It's the beginning man, it's the
very beginnin' of things, where we're standin' here, this very blessed
day of grace.  It's Batty has travelled all his life, and seen the
lands, but never did Batty live till now!"

"It's grand," murmured Franklin, half dreamily and unconsciously
repeating the very words of his friend, as he had done before.

Yet Franklin was well bitten of the ambition germ.  It would serve him
to run only in the front rank.  He was not content to dream.  He saw
the great things ahead, and the small things that lay between.  In a
week he was the guiding mind in the affairs of the odd partnership
which now sprang between him and his friend.  Battersleigh would have
lived till autumn in his tent, but Franklin saw that the need of a
house was immediate.  He took counsel of Curly, the cowboy, who proved
guardian and benefactor.  Curly forthwith produced a workman, a giant
Mexican, a half-witted _mozo_, who had followed the cow bands from the
far Southwest, and who had hung about Curly's own place as a sort of
menial, bound to do unquestioningly whatever Curly bade.  This curious
being, a very colossus of strength, was found to be possessed of a
certain knowledge in building houses after the fashion of that
land--that is to say, of sods and earthen unbaked bricks--and since
under his master's direction he was not less serviceable than docile,
it was not long before the "claim" of Battersleigh was adorned with a
comfortable house fit for either winter or summer habitation.  Franklin
meantime selected the body of land upon which he proposed to make
settlers' entry, this happily not far from his friend, and soon this
too had its house--small, crude, brown, meagre, but not uncomforting to
one who looked over the wide land and saw none better than his own.
Then, little by little, they got precious coal from the railroad, this
land having but scant fuel near at hand, and they built great stacks of
the _bois des vaches_, that fuel which Nature left upon the plains
until the railroads brought in coal and wood.  Each man must, under the
law, live upon his own land, but in practice this was no hardship.
Each must of necessity cook for himself, sew for himself, rely upon
himself for all those little comforts which some men miss so keenly,
and which others so quickly learn to supply.  To these two this was but
comfortable campaigning.

There remained ever before the minds of the settlers the desirability
of laying this land under tribute, of forcing it to yield a livelihood.
Franklin had no wish to depart from his original plans.  He looked to
see all the ways of the civilization he had left behind come duly
hither to search him out.  He was not satisfied to abandon his law
books for the saddle, but as yet there was no possibility of any
practice in the law, though meantime one must live, however simply.  It
was all made easy.  That wild Nature, which had erected rude barriers
against the coming of the white man, had at her reluctant recession
left behind the means by which the white man might prevail.  Even in
the "first year" the settler of the new West was able to make his
living.  He killed off the buffalo swiftly, but he killed them in
numbers so desperately large that their bones lay in uncounted tons all
over a desolated empire.  First the hides and then the bones of the
buffalo gave the settler his hold upon the land, which perhaps he could
not else have won.

Franklin saw many wagons coming and unloading their cargoes of bleached
bones at the side of the railroad tracks.  The heap of bones grew vast,
white, ghastly, formidable, higher than a house, more than a bowshot
long.  There was a market for all this back in that country which had
conceived this road across the desert.  Franklin put out a wagon at
this industry, hauling in the fuel and the merchandise of the raw
plains.  He bought the grim product of others who were ready to sell
and go out the earlier again.  He betimes had out more than one wagon
of his own; and Battersleigh, cavalryman, became Batty, scouter for
bones, while Franklin remained at the market.  It was Franklin who,
bethinking himself of the commercial difference between hard black horn
and soft, spongy bone, began the earliest shipments of the tips of the
buffalo horns, which he employed a man to saw off and pack into sacks
ready for the far-off button factories.  Many tons of these tips alone
he came to ship, such had been the incredible abundance and the
incredible waste; and thus thriving upon an industry whose cause and
whose possibility he deplored, he came to realize considerable sums and
saw the question of subsistence pass rapidly into unconcern.  Thus he
had gone to work in his new and untried world with a direct and
effective force.  He dropped from him as a garment the customs and
standards of the world he had left behind, and at once took his place
as a factor in a new order of things.

Meantime the little town added building after building along its
straggling street, each of these houses of a single story, with a large
square of board front which projected deceptively high and wide,
serving to cover from direct view the rather humiliating lack of
importance in the actual building.  These new edifices were for the
most part used as business places, the sorts of commerce being but
two--"general merchandise," which meant chiefly saddles and firearms,
and that other industry of new lands which flaunts under such
signboards as the Lone Star, the Happy Home, the Quiet Place, the
Cowboy's Dream, and such descriptive nomenclature.  Of fourteen
business houses, nine were saloons, and all these were prosperous.
Money was in the hands of all.  The times had not yet come when a
dollar seemed a valuable thing.  Men were busy living, busy at
exercising this vast opportunity of being prehistoric.

One by one, then in a body, as though struck by panic, the white tents
of the railroad labourers vanished, passing on yet farther to the West,
only the engineers remaining at Ellisville and prosecuting from the
haven of the stone hotel the work of continuing the line.  The place of
the tents was taken by vast white-topped wagons, the creaking cook
carts of the cattle trail, and the van of the less nomadic man.  It was
the beginning of the great cattle drive from the Southern to the
Northern ranges, a strange, wild movement in American life which
carried in its train a set of conditions as vivid and peculiar as they
were transient.  At Ellisville there was no ordered way of living.  The
frontier was yet but one vast camp.  It was, as Battersleigh had said,
the beginning of things.

Many of the white-topped wagons began to come from the East, not
following the railroad, but travelling the trail of the older
adventurers who had for a generation gone this way, and whose pathway
the railroad took for its own.  Some of these wagons passed still
onward, uncontent.  Others swerved and scattered over the country to
the south and southwest, from which the Indian tribes had now been
driven, and which appeared more tempting to the farming man than lands
farther to the west and higher up that gradual and wonderful incline
which reaches from the Missouri River to the Rockies.  One by one, here
and there, these new men selected their lands and made their first rude
attempts at building for themselves the homes which they coveted and
had come far to win.

Ellisville lay at an eddy in the Plains, and gathered toll of the
strange driftwood which was then afloat.  Though the chutes at the
railway were busy, yet other herds of cattle passed Ellisville and
wandered on north, crowding at the heels of the passing Indians, who
now began to see their own cattle to be doomed.  The main herd of the
buffalo was now reported to be three or four days' drive from
Ellisville, and the men who killed for the railroad camps uttered loud
complaints.  The skin-hunting still went on.  Great wagons, loaded with
parties of rough men, passed on out, bound for the inner haunts, where
they might still find their prey.  The wagons came creaking back loaded
with bales of the shaggy brown robes, which gave the skin-hunters money
with which to join the cowmen at the drinking places.  Some of the
skin-hunters, some of the railroad men, some of the cowmen, some of the
home-seekers, remained in the eddy at Ellisville, this womanless
beginning of a permanent society.  Not sinless was this society at its
incipiency.  In any social atmosphere good and evil are necessary
concomitants.  Sinless men would form a community at best but
perishable.  Tolerance, submission, patriotism so called, brotherly
love so named--all these things were to come later, as they have ever
done in the development of communities, builded mainly upon the
foundation of individual aggressiveness and individual centrifugence.
Having arrived, we wave scented kerchiefs between us and the thought of
such a beginning of our prosperity.  Having become slaves, we scoff at
the thought of a primitive, grand, and happy world, where each man was
a master.  Having lost touch of the earth, having lost sight of the
sky, we opine there could have been small augur in a land where each
man found joy in an earth and sky which to him seemed his own.  There
were those who knew that joy and who foresaw its passing, yet they were
happy.  Edward Franklin saw afar off the dim star of his ambition; yet
for him, as for many another man in those days, it was enough to own
this earthy this sky, to lie down under his own roof at night to
untroubled dreams, to awake each morning to a day of hopeful toil.




CHAPTER IX

THE NEW MOVERS

Far away, across the wide gray plain, appeared a tiny dot, apparently
an unimportant fixture of the landscape.  An hour earlier it might not
have been observed at all by even the keenest eye, and it would have
needed yet more time to assure an observer even now that the dot was a
moving object.  Under the shifting play of the prairie sun the little
object appeared now dark, now light in colour, but became gradually
more distinct.  It came always crawling steadily on.  Presently an
occasional side-blown puff of dust added a certain heraldry, and thus
finally the white-topped wagon and its plodding team came fully into
view, crawling ever persistently from the East into the West.

Meantime, from the direction of the north, there came travelling across
the prairie another cloud of dust more rapid than that stirred up by
the slow-moving emigrant wagon.  Sam, the stage driver, was crossing on
his regular buckboard trip from Ellisville to Plum Centre, and was now
nearly half-way on his journey.  Obviously the courses of these two
vehicles must intersect, and at the natural point of this intersection
the driver of the faster pulled up and waited for the other.  "Movers"
were not yet so common in that region that the stage driver, natural
news agent, must not pause for investigation.

The driver of the wagon, a tall, dark man, drew rein with a grave
salutation, his tired horses standing with drooping heads while there
took place one of the pregnant conversations of the Plains.

"Mornin', friend," said Sam.

"Mornin', sir," said the other.

"Which way you headin', friend?" asked Sam.

"Well, sir," came the answer, slowly, "I rather reckon you've got me.
I've just been movin' on out.  I want to locate, but I reckon my team
could travel a little further if they had to."  This with a certain
grimness in his smile, as though he realized the whimsicality of the
average motive which governed in that day in quests like his.  "Is
there much travel comin' through here this season?" he resumed, turning
in his seat and resting one foot on the wheel as he sat still perched
on the high wagon seat.

"Well," replied Sam, "they ain't so much just yet, but they will be
pretty soon.  You see, the Land Office is about sixty mile east of here
yet, and folks is mostly stoppin' in there.  Land around here is pretty
much all open yet.  If they move the Land Office to the track-end, of
course all this land will be taken up a good deal faster."

"Is it good farmin' land around here?"

"Sure.  Better'n it is farther west, and just as good as it is farther
east.  Wheat'll do well here, and it ain't too cold for corn.  Best cow
country on earth."

"How is Ellisville doing now?"

"Bloomin'."

"Yes, sir, so I heard farther back.  Is it goin' to be a real town?"

"That's whatever!  How can it help it?  It's goin' to be a division
point on the road.  It's goin' to have all the cattle-shippin' trade.
After a while it'll have all the farmin' trade.  It's goin' to be the
town, all right, don't you neglect that.  They's fifteen thousand head
of cattle in around here now.  Town's got two hotels, good livery
stable--that's mine--half a dozen stores, nigh on to a dozen saloons,
an' two barber-shops.  Yes, sir, Ellisville is the place!"

"Which way are you bound, sir?" asked the stranger, still sitting,
apparently in thought, with his chin resting on his hand.

"Well, you see, they's another town goin' up below here about twenty
mile--old man Plum's town, Plum Centre.  I run the mail an' carry folk
acrost from Ellisville to that place.  This here is just about halfway
acrost. Ellisville's about twenty or twenty-five mile north of here."

Sam spoke lucidly enough, but really he was much consumed with
curiosity, for he had seen, behind the driver of the wagon, a face
outlined in the shade. He wondered how many "women-folk" the new mover
had along, this being ever a vital question at that day.  The tall man
on the wagon seat turned his face slowly back toward the interior of
the wagon.

"What do you think, Lizzie?" he asked.

"Dear me, William," came reply from the darkness in a somewhat
complaining voice, "how can I tell?  It all seems alike to me.  You can
judge better than I."

"What do you say, niece?"

The person last addressed rested a hand upon the questioner's shoulder
and lightly climbed out upon the seat by his side, stooping as she
passed under the low bow of the cover frame.  She stood upright, a tall
and gracious figure, upon the wagon floor in front of the seat, and
shaded her eyes as she looked about her.  Her presence caused Sam to
instinctively straighten up and tug at his open coat. He took off his
hat with a memory of other days, and said his "Good-mornin'" as the
schoolboy does to his teacher--superior, revered, and awesome.

Yet this new character upon this bare little scene was not of a sort to
terrify.  Tall she was and shapely, comely with all the grace of youth
and health, not yet tanned too brown by the searing prairie winds, and
showing still the faint purity of the complexion of the South.  There
was no slouch in her erect and self-respecting carriage, no shiftiness
in her eye, no awkwardness in her speech.  To Sam it was
instantaneously evident that here was a new species of being, one of
which he had but the vaguest notions through any experiences of his
own.  His chief impression was that he was at once grown small, dusty,
and much unshaven.  He flushed as he shifted and twisted on the
buckboard seat.

The girl looked about her for a moment in silence, shading her eyes
still with her curved hand.

"It is much alike, all this country that we have seen since we left the
last farms. Uncle William," she said, "but it doesn't seem dreary to
me. I should think--"

But what she would have thought was broken into by a sudden exclamation
from farther back in the wagon.  A large black face appeared at the
aperture under the front wagon bow, and the owner of it spoke with a
certain oracular vigour.

"Fo' Gawd, Mass' William, less jess stop right yer!  I 'clare, I'se
jess wore to a plum frazzle, a-travelin' an' _a-travelin'_!  Ef we
gwine settle, why, less _settle_, thass all I say!"

The driver of the wagon sat silent for a moment, his leg still hanging
over the end of the seat, his chin in the hand of the arm which rested
upon his other leg, propped up on the dashboard of the wagon.  At
length, quietly, and with no comment, he unbuckled the reins and threw
them out and down upon the ground on either side of the wagon.

"Whoa, boys," he called to the horses, which were too weary to note
that they were no longer asked to go farther on.  Then the driver got
deliberately down.  He was a tall man, of good bearing, in his
shoulders but little of the stoop of the farmer, and on his hands not
any convincing proof that he was personally acquainted with continuous
bodily toil.  His face was thin, aquiline, proud; his hair dark, his
eyes gray.  He might have been a planter, a rancher, a man of leisure
or a man of affairs, as it might happen that one met him at the one
locality or the other.  One might have called him a gentleman, another
only a "pilgrim."  To Sam he was a "mover," and that was all.  His own
duty as proselyter was obvious.  Each new settlement was at war with
all others, population being the first need.

"We'll turn out here," said the man, striking his heel upon the ground
with significant gesture, as was an unconscious custom among the men
who chose out land for themselves in a new region.  "We'll stop here
for a bite to eat, and I reckon we won't go any farther west.  How is
this country around here for water?"

"Sure," said Sam, "excuse me.  I've got a jug along with me.  I nearly
always carry some water along, because they ain't but one creek, and
they ain't no wells.--Have a drink, miss?"  And he politely pulled out
the wooden stopper of a jug and offered it with a hand which jumped in
spite of himself.

"Thank you, sir," said the girl, and her uncle added his courteous
thanks also.  "What I meant to ask, sir, however," he continued, "is
what is the prospect of getting water in this part of the country in
case we should like to settle in here?"

"Oh, that?" said Sam.  "Why, say, you couldn't very well hit it much
better.  Less'n a mile farther down this trail to the south you come to
the Sinks of the White Woman Creek.  They's most always some water in
that creek, and you can git it there any place by diggin' ten or twenty
feet.

"That's good," said the stranger.  "That's mighty good."  He turned to
the wagon side and called out to his wife.  "Come, Lizzie," he said,
"get out, dear, and take a rest.  We'll have a bite to eat, and then
we'll talk this all over."

The woman to whom he spoke next appeared at the wagon front and was
aided to the ground.  Tall, slender, black clad, with thin, pale face,
she seemed even more unsuited than her husband to the prospect which
lay before them.  She stood for a moment alone, looking about her at
the land which had long been shut off from view by the wagon tent, then
turned and went close to the man, upon whom she evidently relied for
the solution of life's problems.  Immediately behind her there
clambered down from the wagon, with many groanings and complaints, the
goodly bulk of the black woman who had earlier given her advice.  "Set
down yer, Mis' Lizzie, in the shade," she said, spreading a rug upon
the ground upon the side of the wagon farthest from the sun.  "Set down
an' git a ress.  Gawd knows we all needs it--this yer fo'saken kentry.
'Tain' good as Mizzoury, let 'lone Kaintucky er Ole Vehginny--no, mam!"

There was thus now established, by the chance of small things, the
location of a home.  This wagon, with its occupants, had come far and
journeyed vaguely, having no given point in view.  The meeting of this
other vehicle, here in the middle of the untracked prairie, perhaps
aided by the chance words of a tired negress, made the determining
circumstances.  It was done.  It was decided.  There was a relief at
once upon every countenance.  Now these persons were become citizens of
this land.  Unwittingly, or at least tacitly, this was admitted when
the leader of this little party advanced to the side of the buckboard
and offered his hand.

"My name is Buford," he said slowly and with grave courtesy.  "This is
my wife; my niece, Miss Beauchamp.  Your name, sir, I don't know, but
we are very glad to meet you."

"My name's Poston," said Sam, as he also now climbed down from his
seat, seeing that the matter was clinched and that he had gained a
family for his county--"Sam Poston.  I run the livery barn.  I sure
hope you'll stop in here, for you won't find no better country.  Do you
allow you'll move up to Ellisville and live there?"

"Well, I've started out to get some land," said Buford, "and I presume
that the first thing is to find that and get the entry made.  Then
we'll have to live on it till we can commute it.  I don't know that it
would suit us at Ellisville just yet.  It must be a rather hard town,
from all I can learn, and hardly fit for ladies."

"That's so," said Sam, "it ain't just the quietest place in the world
for women-folks.  Only five or six women in the place yet, outside the
section boss's wife and the help at the depot hotel.  Still," he added
apologetically, "folks soon gets used to the noise.  I don't mind it no
more at all."

Buford smiled as he glanced quizzically at the faces of his
"women-folks."  At this moment Sam broke out with a loud exclamation.

"Say!" he cried.

"Yes, sir," said Buford.

"I'll tell you what!"

"Yes?"

"Now, you listen to me.  I'll tell you what!  You see, this here place
where we are now is just about a mile from the White Woman Sinks, and
that is, as I was sayin', just about halfway between Ellisville and
Plum Centre.  Now, look here.  This country's goin' to boom.  They's
goin' to be a plenty of people come in here right along.  There'll be a
regular travel from Ellis down to Plum Centre, and it's too long a trip
to make between meals.  My passengers all has to carry meals along with
'em, and they kick on that a-plenty.  Now, you look here.  Listen to
me.  You just go down to the White Woman, and drive your stake there.
Take up a quarter for each one of you.  Put you up a sod house quick as
you can--I'll git you help for that.  Now, if you can git anything to
cook, and can give meals to my stage outfit when I carry passengers
through here, why, I can promise you, you'll git business, and you'll
git it a-plenty, too.  Why, say, this'd be the best sort of a lay-out,
all around.  You can start just as good a business here as you could at
Ellisville, and it's a heap quieter here.  Now, I want some one to
start just such a eatin' place somewheres along here, and if you'll do
that, you'll make a stake here in less'n two years, sure's you're born."

Sam's conviction gave him eloquence.  He was talking of business now,
of the direct, practical things which were of immediate concern in the
life of the region about.  The force of what he said would not have
been apparent to the unpracticed observer, who might have seen no
indication in the wide solitude about that there would ever be here a
human population or a human industry.  Buford was schooled enough to be
more just in his estimate, and he saw the reasonableness of what his
new acquaintance had said.  Unconsciously his eye wandered over to the
portly form of the negress, who sat fanning herself, a little apart
from the others.  He smiled again with the quizzical look on his face.
"How about that, Aunt Lucy?" he said.

"Do hit, Mass' William," replied the coloured woman at once with
conviction, and extending an energetic forefinger.  "You jess do whut
this yer man says.  Ef they's any money to be made a-cookin', I kin do
all the cookin' ever you wants, ef you-all kin git anything to cook.
Yas, suh!"

"You ain't makin' no mistake," resumed Sam.  "You go in and git your
land filed on, and put you up a sod house or dugout for the first
season, because lumber's awful high out here.  It's pretty late to do
anything with a crop this year, even if you had any breakin' done, but
you can take your team and gether bones this fall and winter, and
that'll make you a good livin', too.  You can git some young stock out
of the trail cattle fer a'most anything you want to give, and you can
hold your bunch in here on the White Woman when you git started.  You
can cut a little hay a little lower down on the White Woman for your
team, or they can range out in here all winter and do well, just like
your cows can.  You can git a lot of stock about you before long, and
what with keepin' a sort of eatin' station and ranchin' it a bit, you
ought to git along mighty well, I should say.  But--'scuse me, have you
ever farmed it much?"

"Well, sir," said Buford, slowly, "I used to plant corn and cotton,
back in Kentucky, befo' the war."

"And you come from Kentucky out here?"

"Not precisely that; no, sir.  I moved to Missouri from Kentucky after
the war, and came from Missouri here."

Sam looked at him, puzzled.  "I allowed you'd never ranched it much,"
he said, vaguely.  "How'd you happen to come out here?"

The quizzical smile again crossed Buford's face.  "I think I shall have
to give that up, on my honour," he said.  "We just seem to have started
on West, and to have kept going until we got here.  It seemed to be the
fashion--especially if you'd lost about everything in the world and
seen everything go to pieces all about you."  He added this with a slow
and deliberate bitterness which removed the light trace of humour for
the time.

"From Kentucky, eh?" said Sam, slowly and meditatively.  "Well, it
don't make no difference where you come from; we want good men in here,
and you'll find this a good country, I'll gamble on that.  I've
followed the front clean acrost the State, the last ten years, and I
tell you it's all right here.  You can make it if you take hold right.
Now I must be gittin' along again over toward Plum Centre.  See you
again if you stop in here on White Woman--see you several times a week,
like enough.  You must come up to Ellis soon as you git straightened
out.  Ain't many women-folks up there, but then they're fine what there
is.  Say," and he drew Buford to one side as he whispered to him--"say,
they's a mighty fine girl--works in the depot hotel--Nory's her
name--you'll see her if you ever come up to town.  I'm awful gone on
that girl, and if you git any chanct, if you happen to be up there, you
just put in a good word for me, won't you?  I'd do as much for you.  I
didn't know, you know, but what maybe some of your women-folks'd sort
of know how it was, you know.  They understand them things, I reckon."

Buford listened with grave politeness, though with a twinkle in his
eye, and promised to do what he could.  Encouraged at this, Sam stepped
up and shook hands with Mrs. Buford and with the girl, not forgetting
Aunt Lucy, an act which singularly impressed that late inhabitant of a
different land, and made him her fast friend for life.

"Well, so long," he said to them all in general as he turned away, "and
good luck to you.  You ain't makin' no mistake in settlin' here.
Good-bye till I see you all again."

He stepped into the buckboard and clucked to his little team, the dust
again rising from under the wheels.  The eyes of those remaining
followed him already yearningly.  In a half hour there had been
determined the location of a home, there had been suggested a means of
livelihood, and there had been offered and received a friendship.
Here, in the middle of the great gray Plains, where no sign of any
habitation was visible far as the eye could reach, these two white men
had met and shaken hands.  In a half hour this thing had become matter
of compact.  They had taken the oath.  They had pledged themselves to
become members of society, working together--working, as they thought,
each for himself, but working also, as perhaps they did not dream, at
the hest of some destiny governing plans greater than their own.  As
Buford turned he stumbled and kicked aside a bleached buffalo skull,
which lay half hidden in the red grass at his feet.




CHAPTER X

THE CHASE

The summer flamed up into sudden heat, and seared all the grasses, and
cut down the timid flowers.  Then gradually there came the time of
shorter days and cooler nights.  The grass curled tight down to the
ground.  The air carried a suspicion of frost upon some steel-clear
mornings.  The golden-backed plover had passed to the south in long,
waving lines, which showed dark against the deep blue sky.  Great
flocks of grouse now and then rocked by at morning or evening.  On the
sand bars along the infrequent streams thousands of geese gathered,
pausing in their flight to warmer lands.  On the flats of the
Rattlesnake, a pond-lined stream, myriads of ducks, cranes, swans, and
all manner of wild fowl daily made mingled and discordant chorus.
Obviously all the earth was preparing for the winter time.

It became not less needful for mankind to take thought for the morrow.
Winter on the Plains was a season of severity for the early settlers,
whose resources alike in fuel and food were not too extensive.
Franklin's forethought had provided the houses of himself and
Battersleigh with proper fuel, and he was quite ready to listen to
Curly when the latter suggested that it might be a good thing for them
to follow the usual custom and go out on a hunt for the buffalo herd,
in order to supply themselves with their winter's meat.

Before the oncoming white men these great animals were now rapidly
passing away, from month to month withdrawing farther back from the
settlements.  Reports from the returning skin-hunters set the distance
of the main herd at three to five days' journey.  The flesh of the
buffalo was now a marketable commodity at any point along the railway;
but the settler who owned a team and a rifle was much more apt to go
out and kill his own meat than to buy it of another.  There were many
wagons which went out that fall from Ellisville besides those of the
party with which Franklin, Battersleigh, and Curly set out.  These
three had a wagon and riding horses, and they were accompanied by a
second wagon, owned by Sam, the liveryman, who took with him Curly's
_mozo_, the giant Mexican, Juan.  The latter drove the team, a task
which Curly scornfully refused when it was offered him, his cowboy
creed rating any conveyance other than the saddle as far beneath his
station.

"Juan can drive all right," he said.  "He druv a cook wagon all the way
from the Red River up here.  Let him and Sam drive, and us three
fellers'll ride."

The task of the drivers was for the most part simple, as the flat floor
of the prairies stretched away evenly mile after mile, the horses
jogging along dejectedly but steadily over the unbroken short gray
grass, ignorant and careless of any road or trail.

At night they slept beneath the stars, uncovered by any tent, and
saluted constantly by the whining coyotes, whose vocalization was
betimes broken by the hoarser, roaring note of the great gray buffalo
wolf.  At morn they awoke to an air surcharged with some keen elixir
which gave delight in sense of living.  The subtle fragrance of the
plains, born of no fruit or flower, but begotten of the sheer
cleanliness of the thrice-pure air, came to their nostrils as they
actually snuffed the day.  So came the sun himself, with heralds of
pink and royal purple, with banners of flaming red and gold.  At this
the coyotes saluted yet more shrilly and generally.  The lone gray
wolf, sentinel on some neighbouring ridge, looked down, contemptuous in
his wisdom.  Perhaps a band of antelope tarried at some crest.  Afar
upon the morning air came the melodious trumpeting of wild fowl, rising
from some far-off unknown roosting place and setting forth upon errand
of their own.  All around lay a new world, a wild world, a virgin
sphere not yet acquaint with man.  Phoenicians of the earthy seas,
these travellers daily fared on into regions absolutely new.

Early upon the morning of the fourth day of their journey the
travellers noted that the plain began to rise and sink in longer waves.
Presently they found themselves approaching a series of rude and
wild-looking hills of sand, among which they wound deviously as they
might, confronted often by forbidding buttes and lofty dunes whose only
sign of vegetation was displayed in a ragged fringe of grass which
waved like a scalp lock here and there upon the summits.  For many
miles they travelled through this difficult and cheerless region, the
horses soon showing signs of distress and all the party feeling need of
water, of which the supply had been exhausted.  It was nearly noon
while they were still involved in this perplexing region, and as none
of the party had ever seen the country before, none could tell how long
it might be before they would emerge from it.  They pushed on in
silence, intent upon what might be ahead, so that when there came an
exclamation from the half-witted Mexican, whose stolid silence under
most circumstances had become a proverb among them, each face was at
once turned toward him.

"Eh, what's that, Juan?" said Curly--"Say, boys, he says we're about
out of the sand hills.  Prairie pretty soon now, he says."

"And will ye tell me, now," said Battersleigh, "how the haythen knows a
bit more of it than we oursilves?  He's never been here before.  I'm
thinkin' it's pure guess he's givin' us, me boy."

"No, sir," said Curly, positively.  "If Juan says a thing like that, he
knows.  I don't know how he knows it, but he shore does, and I'll
gamble on him every time.  You see, he ain't hardly like folks, that
feller.  He's more like a critter.  He knows a heap of things that you
and me don't."

"That's curious," said Franklin.  "How do you account for it?"

"Kin savvy," said Curly.  "I don't try to account for it, me.  I only
know it's so.  You see if it ain't."

And so it was.  The wall of the sand hills was for a time apparently as
endless and impervious as ever, and they still travelled on in silence,
the Mexican making no further sign of interest.  Yet presently the
procession of the sand dunes began to show gaps and open places.  The
hills grew less tall and more regular of outline.  Finally they shrank
and fell away, giving place again to the long roll of the prairie,
across which, and near at hand to the edge of the sand hills, there cut
the open and flat bed of a water way, now apparently quite dry.

"We're all right for water now," said Sam.  "See that little pile of
rocks, 'bout as high as your head, off to the right down the creek?
That's water there, sure."

"Yep," said Curly.  "She's there, sure.  Or you could git it by diggin'
anywheres in here in the creek bed, inside of four or five feet at
most."

Franklin again felt constrained to ask somewhat of the means by which
these two felt so confident of their knowledge.  "Well, now, Curly," he
said, "it isn't instinct this time, surely, for Juan didn't say
anything about it to you.  I would like to know how you know there is
water ahead."

"Why," said Curly, "that's the sign for water on the plains.  If you
ever see one of them little piles of stones standin' up, you can depend
you can git water there.  Sometimes it marks a place where you can git
down through the breaks to the creek bed, and sometimes it means that
if you dig in the bed there you can find water, 'lowin' the creek's
dry."

"But who built up the rock piles to make these signs?" asked Franklin.

"O Lord!  now you've got me," said Curly.  "I don't know no more about
that than you do.  Injuns done it, maybe.  Some says the first
wild-horse hunters put 'em up.  They was always there, all over the dry
country, far back as ever I heard.  You ask Juan if there ain't water
not far off.  See what he says.--_Oye, Juan!  Tengo agua, poco tiempo_?"

The giant did not even lift his head, but answered listlessly, "_Agua?
Si_," as though that were a matter of which all present must have equal
knowledge.

"That settles it," said Curly.  "I never did know Juan to miss it on
locatin' water yet, not onct.  I kin fairly taste it now.  But you see,
Juan, he don't seem to go by no rock-pile signs.  He just seems to
smell water, like a horse or a steer."

They now rode on more rapidly, bearing off toward the cairn which made
the water sign.  All at once Juan lifted his head, listened for a
moment, and then said, with more show of animation than he had yet
displayed and with positiveness in his voice: "_Vacas_!" ("cows;
cattle").

Curly straightened up in his saddle as though electrified.  "_Vacas?
Onde, Juan_?--where's any cows?"  He knew well enough that no hoof of
domestic cattle had ever trod this country.  Yet trust as he did the
dictum of the giant's strange extra sense, he could not see, anywhere
upon the wide country round about them, any signs of the buffalo to
which he was sure the Mexican meant to call his attention.

"_Vacas! muchas_," repeated Juan carelessly.

"Lots of 'em, eh?  Well, I'd like to know where they are, my lily of
the valley," said Curly, for once almost incredulous.  And then he
stopped and listened.--"Hold on, boys, listen," he said.  "Look
out--look out!  Here they come!"

Every ear caught the faint distant pattering, which grew into a rapid
and insistent rumble.  "Cavalry, b'gad!" cried Battersleigh.
Franklin's eyes shone.  He spurred forward fast as he could go, jerking
loose the thong which held his rifle fast in the scabbard under his leg.

The tumultuous roaring rumble came on steadily, the more apparent by a
widening and climbing cloud of dust, which betokened that a body of
large animals was coming up through the "breaks" from the bed of the
stream to the prairie on which the wagons stood.  Presently there
appeared at the brink, looming through the white dust cloud, a mingling
mass of tangled, surging brown, a surface of tossing, hairy backs,
spotted with darker fronts, over all and around all the pounding and
clacking of many hoofs.  It was the stampede of the buffalo which had
been disturbed at their watering place below, and which had headed up
to the level that they might the better make their escape in flight.
Head into the wind, as the buffalo alone of wild animals runs, the herd
paid no heed to the danger which they sought to escape, but upon which
they were now coming in full front.  The horses of the hunters,
terrified at this horrid apparition of waving horned heads and shaggy
manes, plunged and snorted in terror, seeing which the first rank of
the buffalo in turn fell smitten of panic, and braced back to avoid the
evil at their front.  Overturned by the crush behind them, these none
the less served to turn the course of the remainder of the herd, which
now broke away to the right, paralleling the course of the stream and
leaving the wagons of the hunters behind them and at their left.  The
herd carried now upon its flank three figures which clung alongside and
poured sharp blue jets of smoke into the swirling cloud of ashy dust.

It was neck and neck for the three.  The cowboy, Curly, had slightly
the advance of the others, but needed to spur hard to keep even with
Battersleigh, the old cavalryman, who rode with weight back and hands
low, as though it were cross country in old Ireland.  Franklin
challenged both in the run up, riding with the confidence of the man
who learned the saddle young in life.  They swerved slightly apart as
they struck the flank of the herd and began to fire.  At such range it
was out of the question to miss.  Franklin and Battersleigh killed two
buffaloes each, losing other head by reason of delivering their fire
too high up in the body, a common fault with the beginner on bison.
Curly ran alongside a good cow, and at the third shot was able to see
the great creature stumble and fall.  Yet another he killed before his
revolver was empty.  The butchery was sudden and all too complete.  As
they turned back from the chase they saw that even Sam, back at the
wagon, where he had been unable to get saddle upon one of the wagon
horses in time for the run, had been able to kill his share.  Seeing
the horses plunging, Juan calmly went to their heads and held them
quiet by main strength, one in each hand, while Sam sprang from the
wagon and by a long shot from his heavy rifle knocked down a good fat
cow.  The hunters looked at the vast bodies lying prostrate along the
ground before them, and felt remorse at their intemperance.

"The hunt's over," said Franklin, looking at the dead animals.  "We've
enough for us all."

"Yes, sir," said Curly, "we shore got meat, and got it plenty
sudden.--Juan, _vamos, pronto_!"  He made signs showing that he wished
the Mexican to skin and dress the buffalo, and the latter, as usual,
proceeded to give immediate and unhesitating obedience.




CHAPTER XI

THE BATTLE

Occupied for a few moments with the other at the wagon, Franklin ceased
to watch Juan, as he went slowly but not unskilfully about the work of
dressing the dead buffalo.  Suddenly he heard a cry, and looking up,
saw the Mexican running hurriedly toward the wagon and displaying an
animation entirely foreign to his ordinary apathetic habit.  He pointed
out over the plain as he came on, and called out excitedly: "_Indios!
Los Indios_!"

The little party cast one long, careful look out toward the horizon,
upon which now appeared a thin, waving line of dust.  A moment later
the two wagons were rolled up side by side, the horses were fastened
securely as possible, the saddles and blanket rolls were tossed into
breastworks at the ends of the barricade, and all the feeble defences
possible were completed.  Four rifles looked steadily out, and every
face was set and anxious, except that of the Mexican who had given the
alarm.  Juan was restless, and made as though to go forth to meet the
advancing line.

"_Vamos--me vamos_!" he said, struggling to get past Curly, who pushed
him back.

"Set down, d----n you--set down!" said Curly, and with his strange,
childlike obedience, the great creature sat down and remained for a
moment submissively silent.

The indefinite dust line turned from gray to dark, and soon began to
show colours--black, red, roan, piebald--as the ponies came on with
what seemed an effect of a tossing sea of waving manes and tails,
blending and composing with the deep sweeping feather trails of the
grand war bonnets.  Hands rose and fell with whips, and digging heels
kept up the unison.  Above the rushing of the hoofs there came forward
now and then a keen ululation.  Red-brown bodies, leaning, working up
and down, rising and falling with the motion of the ponies, came into
view, dozens of them--scores of them.  Their moccasined feet were
turned back under the horses' bellies, the sinewy legs clamping the
horse from thigh to ankle as the wild riders came on, with no bridle
governing their steeds other than the jaw rope's single strand.

"Good cavalry, b'gad!" said Battersleigh calmly, as he watched them in
their perfect horsemanship.  "See 'em come!"  Franklin's eyes drew
their brows down in a narrowing frown, though he remained silent, as
was his wont at any time of stress.

The Indians came on, close up to the barricade, where they saw the
muzzles of four rifles following them steadily, a sight which to them
carried a certain significance.  The line broke and wheeled,
scattering, circling, still rising and falling, streaming in hair and
feathers, and now attended with a wild discord of high-keyed yells.

"Keep still, boys; don't shoot!" cried Franklin instinctively.  "Wait!"

It was good advice.  The mingling, shifting line, obedient to some loud
word of commando swept again up near to the front of the barricade,
then came to a sudden halt with half the forefeet off the ground.  The
ponies shuffled and fidgeted, and the men still yelled and called out
unintelligible sounds, but the line halted.  It parted, and there rode
forward an imposing figure.

Gigantic, savage, stern, clad in the barbaric finery of his race, his
body nearly nude, his legs and his little feet covered with bead-laden
buckskin, his head surmounted with a horned war bonnet whose eagle
plumes trailed down the pony's side almost to the ground, this Indian
headman made a picture not easily to be forgotten nor immediately to be
despised.  He sat his piebald stallion with no heed to its restive
prancing.  Erect, immobile as a statue, such was the dignity of his
carriage, such the stroke of his untamed eye, that each man behind the
barricade sank lower and gripped his gun more tightly.  This was a
personality not to be held in any hasty or ill-advised contempt.

The Indian walked his horse directly up to the barricade, his eye
apparently scorning to take in its crude details.

"Me, White Calf!" he exclaimed in English, like the croak of a parrot,
striking his hand upon his breast with a gesture which should have been
ludicrous or pompous, but was neither.  "Me, White Calf!" said the
chief again, and lifted the medal which lay upon his breast.  "Good.
White man come.  White man go.  Me hunt, now!"

He swept his arm about in a gesture which included the horizon, and
indicated plainly his conviction that all the land belonged to him and
his own people.  So he stood, silent, and waiting with no nervousness
for the diplomacy of the others.

Franklin stepped boldly out from the barricade and extended his hand.
"White Calf, good friend," said he.  The Indian took his hand without a
smile, and with a look which Franklin felt go through him.  At last the
chief grunted out something, and, dismounting, seated himself down upon
the ground, young men taking his horse and leading it away.  Others,
apparently also of rank, came and sat down.  Franklin and his friends
joined the rude circle of what they were glad to see was meant to be an
impromptu council.

White Calf arose and faced the white men.

"White men go!" he said, his voice rising.  "Injun heap shoot!"

"B'gad, I believe the haythen thinks he can scare us," said
Battersleigh, calmly.

Franklin pointed to the carcasses of the buffalo, and made signs that
after they had taken the meat of the buffalo they would go.  Apparently
he was understood.  Loud words arose among the Indians, and White Calf
answered, gesticulating excitedly:

"Heap good horse!" he said, pointing to the horses of the party.
"White man go!  Injun heap get horse!  Injun heap shoot!"

"This is d----d intimidation!" shouted Battersleigh, starting up and
shaking a fist in White Calf's face.

"Give up our horses?  Not by a d----d sight!" said Curly.  "You can
heap shoot if you want to turn loose, but you'll never set me afoot out
here, not while I'm a-knowin' it!"

The situation was tense, and Franklin felt his heart thumping, soldier
though he was.  He began to step back toward the wagons with his
friends.  A confused and threatening uproar arose among the Indians,
who now began to crowd forward.  It was an edged instant.  Any second
might bring on the climax.

And suddenly the climax came.  From the barricade at the rear there
rose a cry, half roar and half challenge.  The giant Mexican Juan, for
a time quieted by Curly's commands, was now seized upon by some impulse
which he could no longer control.  He came leaping from behind the
wagons, brandishing the long knife with which he had been engaged upon
the fallen buffalo.

"_Indios_!" he cried, "_Indios_!" and what followed of his speech was
only incoherent savage babblings.  He would have darted alone into the
thick of the band had not Franklin and Curly caught him each by a leg
as he passed.

The chief, White Calf, moved never a muscle in his face as he saw his
formidable adversary coming on, nor did he join in the murmurs that
arose among his people.  Rather there came a glint into his eye, a
shade of exultation in his heavy face.  "Big chief!" he said, simply.
"Heap fight!"

"You bet your blame life he'll heap fight!" said Curly, from his
position upon Juan's brawny breast as he held him down.  "He's good for
any two of you, you screechin' cowards!"

Curly's words were perhaps not fully understood, yet the import of his
tone was unmistakable.  There was a stirring along the line, as though
a snake rustled in the grass.  The horse-holders were crowding up
closer.  There were bows drawn forward over the shoulders of many young
men, and arrows began to shiver on the string under their itching
fingers.  Once more Franklin felt that the last moment had come, and he
and Battersleigh still pressed back to the wagons where the rifles lay.

The Indian chief raised his hand and came forward, upon his face some
indescribable emotion which removed it from mere savagery, some
half-chivalrous impulse born perhaps of a barbaric egotism and
self-confidence, perhaps of that foolhardy and vain love of risk which
had made White Calf chief of his people and kept him so.  He stood
silent for a moment, his arms folded across his breast with that
dramatic instinct never absent from the Indian's mind.  When he spoke,
the scorn and bravado in his voice were apparent, and his words were
understood though his speech was broken.

"Big chief!" he said, pointing toward Juan.  "White Calf, me big
chief," pointing to himself.  "Heap fight!"  Then he clinched his hands
and thrust them forward, knuckles downward, the Indian sign for death,
for falling dead or being struck down.  With his delivery this was
unmistakable.  "Me," he said, "me dead; white man go.  Big chief"
(meaning Juan), "him dead; Injun heap take horse," including in the
sweep of his gesture all the outfit of the white men.

"He wants to fight Juan by himself," cried Franklin.

"Yes, and b'gad he's doin' it for pure love of a fight, and hurray for
him!" cried Battersleigh.  "Hurray, boys!  Give him a cheer!"  And,
carried away for the moment by Battersleigh's own dare-deviltry, as
well as a man's admiration for pluck, they did rise and give him a
cheer, even to Sam, who had hitherto been in line, but very silent.
They cheered old White Calf, self-offered champion, knowing that he had
death in a hundred blankets at his back.

The meaning of the white men was also clear.  The grim face of White
Calf relaxed for a moment into something like a half-smile of pride.
"Heap fight!" he repeated simply, his eyes fixed on the vast form of
the babbling giant.  He dropped his blanket fully back from his body
and stood with his eyes boring forward at his foe, his arms crossed
arrogantly over his naked, ridging trunk, proud, confident, superb, a
dull-hued statue whose outlines none who witnessed ever again forgot.

There was no time to parley or to decide.  Fate acted rapidly through
the agency of a half-witted mind.  Juan the Mexican was regarding the
Indian intently.  Perhaps he gathered but little of the real meaning of
that which had transpired, but something in the act or look of the
chieftain aroused and enraged him.  He saw and understood the
challenge, and he counted nothing further.  With one swift upheaval of
his giant body, he shook off restraining hands and sprang forward.  He
stripped off his own light upper garment, and stood as naked and more
colossal than his foe.  Weapon of his own he had none, nor cared for
any.  More primitive even than his antagonist, he sought for nothing
letter than the first weapon of primeval man, a club, which should
extend the sweep of his own arm.  From the hand of the nearest Indian
he snatched a war club, not dissimilar to that which hung at White
Calf's wrist, a stone-headed beetle, grooved and bound fast with
rawhide to a long, slender, hard-wood handle, which in turn was
sheathed in a heavy rawhide covering, shrunk into a steel-like
re-enforcement.  Armed alike, naked alike, savage alike, and purely
animal in the blind desire of battle, the two were at issue before a
hand could stay them.  All chance of delay or separation was gone.
Both white and red men fell back and made arena for a unique and awful
combat.

There was a moment of measuring, that grim advance balance struck when
two strong men meet for a struggle which for either may end alone in
death.  The Indian was magnificent in mien, superb in confidence.  Fear
was not in him.  His vast figure, nourished on sweet meat of the
plains, fed by pure air and developed by continual exercise, showed
like the torso of a minor Hercules, powerful but not sluggish in its
power.  His broad and deep chest, here and there spotted with white
scars, arched widely for the vital organs, but showed no clogging fat.
His legs were corded and thin.  His arms were also slender, but showing
full of easy-playing muscles with power of rapid and unhampered
strength.  Two or three inches above the six-feet mark he stood as he
cast off his war bonnet and swept back a hand over the standing eagle
plumes, whipped fast to his braided hair.  White Calf was himself a
giant.

Yet huge and menacing as he stood, the figure opposed to him was still
more formidable.  Juan, the _mozo_ overtopped him by nearly half a
head, and was as broad or broader in the shoulder.  His body, a dull
brown in colour, showed smoother than that of his enemy, the muscles
not having been brought out by unremitted exercise.  Yet under that
bulk of flesh there lay no man might tell how much of awful vigour.
The loop of the war club would not slip over his great hand.  He caught
it in his fingers and made the weapon hum about his head, as some
forgotten ancestor of his, tall Navajo, or forgotten cave dweller, may
have done before the Spaniard came.  The weapon seemed to him like a
toy, and he cast his eye about for another more commensurate with his
strength, but, seeing none, forgot the want, and in the sheer ignorance
of fear which made his bravery, began the fight as though altogether
careless of its end.

White Calf was before his people, whose chief he was by reason of his
personal prowess, and with all the vanity of his kind he exulted in
this opportunity of displaying his fitness for his place.  Yet in him
natural bravery had a qualifying caution, which was here obviously well
justified.  The Mexican made direct assault, rushing on with battle axe
poised as though to end it all with one immediate blow.  With guard and
parry he was more careless than the wild bull of the Plains, which
meets his foe in direct impetuous assault.  White Calf was not so rash.
He stepped quickly back from the attack, and as the _mozo_ plunged
forward from the impulse of his unchecked blow, the Indian swept
sternly at him with the full force of his extended arm.  The caution of
the chief, and the luck of a little thing, each in turn prevented the
ending of the combat at its outset.  Half falling onward, the Mexican
slipped upon a tuft of the hard gray grass and went down headlong.  A
murmur arose from the Indians, who thought at first that their leader's
blow had proved fatal.  A sharp call from Curly seemed to bring the
Mexican to his feet at once.  The Indian lost the half moment which was
his own.  Again the two engaged, White Calf now seeking to disconcert
the Mexican, whom he discovered to be less agile than himself.  Darting
in and out, jumping rapidly from side to side, and uttering the while
the sharp staccato of his war call, he passed about the Mexican, half
circling and returning, his eye fixed straight upon the other's, and
his war club again and again hurtling dangerously close to his
opponents head.  One shade more of courage, one touch more of the
daring necessary to carry him a single foot closer in, and the victory
had been with him, for no human skull could have withstood the impact
of a pound of flint impelled by an arm so powerful.

Juan the _mozo_ stood almost motionless, his own club half raised, the
great muscles of his arm now showing under the brown skin as he
clinched hard the tiny stem of the weapon.  He seemed not perturbed by
the menaces of the chieftain, and though unaware that the latter must
in time suffer from the violence of his own exertions, nevertheless
remained the fuller master of his own forces by simply waiting in this
one position.  His readiness for offence was the one defence that he
offered.  His brute courage had no mental side.  The whistling of this
threatening weapon was unheeded, since it did not hurt him.  He glared
in fury at the Indian, but always his arm remained half raised, his
foot, but shifted, side stepping and turning only enough to keep him
with front toward his antagonist.  The desperate, eager waiting of his
attitude was awful.  The whisper of the wings of death was on the air
about this place.  The faces of the white men witnessing the spectacle
were drawn and haggard.  A gulp, a sigh, a half groan now and again
came from their parted lips.

White Calf pursued his rapid tactics for some moments, and a dozen
times sped a blow which still fell short.  He gained confidence, and
edged closer in.  He feinted and sprang from side to side, but gained
little ground.  His people saw his purpose, and murmurs of approval
urged him on.  It seemed that in a moment he must land the fatal blow
upon his apparently half-stupefied opponent.  He sought finally to
deliver this blow, but the effort was near to proving his ruin.  Just
as he swung forward, the giant, with a sudden contraction of all his
vast frame, sprang out and brought down his war axe in a sheer downward
blow at half-arm's length.  White Calf with lightning speed changed his
own attack into defence, sweeping up his weapon to defend his head.  On
the instant his arm was beaten down.  It fell helpless at his side, the
axe only hanging to his hand by means of the loop passed around the
wrist.  A spasm of pain crossed his face at the racking agony in the
nerves of his arm, yet he retained energy enough to spring back, and
still he stood erect.  A cry of dismay burst from the followers of the
red champion and a keen yell from the whites, unable to suppress their
exultation, Yet at the next moment the partisans of either had become
silent; for, though the Indian seemed disabled, the _mozo_ stood before
him weaponless.  The tough, slender rod which made the handle of his
war axe had snapped like a pipestem under the force of his blow, and
even the rawhide covering was torn loose from the head of stone, which
lay, with a foot of the broken hard-wood staff still attached, upon the
ground between the two antagonists.

Juan cast away the bit of rod still in his hand and rushed forward
against his enemy, seeking to throttle him with his naked fingers.
White Calf, quicker-witted of the two, slung the thong of his war club
free from his crippled right hand, and, grasping the weapon in his
left, still made play with it about his head.  The giant none the less
rushed in, receiving upon his shoulder a blow from the left hand of the
Indian which cut the flesh clean to the collar bone, in a great bruised
wound which was covered at once with a spurt of blood.  The next
instant the two fell together, the Indian beneath his mighty foe, and
the two writhing in a horrible embrace.  The hands of the _mozo_
gripped the Indian's throat, and he uttered a rasping, savage roar of
triumph, more beastlike than human, as he settled hard upon the chest
of the enemy whose life he was choking out.  Again rose the savage
cries of the on-lookers.

Not even yet had the end come.  There was a heaving struggle, a sharp
cry, and Juan sprang back, pressing his hand against his side, where
blood came from between his fingers.  The Indian had worked his left
hand to the sheath of his knife, and stabbed the giant who had so
nearly overcome him.  Staggering, the two again stood erect, and yet
again came the cries from the many red men and the little band of
whites who were witnessing this barbarous and brutal struggle.  Bows
were bending among the blankets, but the four rifles now pointed
steadily out.  One movement would have meant death to many, but that
movement was fore-stalled in the still more rapid happenings of the
unfinished combat.  For one-half second the two fighting men stood
apart, the one stunned at his unexpected wound, the other startled that
the wound had not proved fatal.  Seeing his antagonist still on his
feet.  White Calf for the first time lost courage.  With the knife
still held in his left hand, he hesitated whether to join again in the
encounter, or himself to guard against the attack of a foe so proof to
injury.  He half turned and gave back for a pace.

The man pursued by a foe looks about him quickly for that weapon
nearest to his own hand.  The dread of steel drove Juan to bethink
himself of a weapon.  He saw it at his feet, and again he roared like
an angry bull, his courage and his purpose alike unchanged.  He stooped
and clutched the broken war axe, grasping the stone head in the palm of
his great hand, the jagged and ironlike shaft projecting from between
his ringers like the blade of a dagger.  With the leap of a wild beast
he sprang again upon his foe.  White Calf half turned, but the left
hand of the giant caught him and held him up against the fatal stroke.
The sharp shaft of wood struck the Indian in the side above the hip,
quartering through till the stone head sunk against the flesh with a
fearful sound.  With a scream the victim straightened and fell forward.
The horrid spectacle was over.




CHAPTER XII

WHAT THE HAND HAD TO DO

In this wide, new world of the West there were but few artificial
needs, and the differentiation of industries was alike impossible and
undesired.  Each man was his own cook, his own tailor, his own mechanic
in the simple ways demanded by the surroundings about him.  Each man
was as good as his neighbour, for his neighbour as well as himself
perforce practised a half-dozen crafts and suffered therefrom neither
in his own esteem nor that of those about him.  The specialists of
trade, of artisanship, of art, were not yet demanded in this
environment where each man in truth "took care of himself," and had
small dependence upon others.

In all the arts of making one's self comfortable in a womanless and
hence a homeless land both Franklin and Battersleigh, experienced
campaigners as they were, found themselves much aided by the counsel of
Curly, the self-reliant native of the soil who was Franklin's first
acquaintance in that land.  It was Curly who helped them with their
houses and in their household supplies.  It was he who told them now
and then of a new region where the crop of bones was not yet fully
gathered.  It was he who showed them how to care for the little number
of animals which they began to gather about them; and who, in short,
gave to them full knowledge of the best ways of exacting a subsistence
from the land which they had invaded.

One morning Franklin, thinking to have an additional buffalo robe for
the coming winter, and knowing no manner in which he could get the hide
tanned except through his own efforts, set about to do this work for
himself, ignorant of the extent of his task, and relying upon Curly for
advice as to the procedure.

Curly sat on his horse and looked on with contempt as Franklin flung
down the raw skin upon the ground.

"You've shore tackled a bigger job than you know anything about, Cap,"
said he, "and, besides that, it ain't a job fittin' fer a man to do.
You ought to git some squaw to do that for you."

"But, you see, there aren't any squaws around," said Franklin, smiling.
"If you'll tell me just how the Indians do it I'll try to see how good
a job I can make of it."

Curly shifted his leg in his saddle and his cud in his mouth, and
pushing his hat back on his forehead, assumed the position of
superintendent.

"Well, it'll take you a long time," said he, "but I 'low it ain't no
use tellin' you not to begin, fer you'll just spile a good hide anyhow.
First thing you do, you stretch yer hide out on the ground, fur side
down, and hold it there with about six hundred pegs stuck down around
the edges.  It'll take you a week to do that.  Then you take a knife
and scrape all the meat off the hide.  That sounds easy, but it'll take
about another week.  Then you git you a little hoe, made out of a piece
of steel, and you dig, and dig, and dig at that hide till you git some
more meat off, and begin to shave it down, thin like.  You got to git
all the grease out of it, an' you got to make all the horny places
soft.  Time you git it dug down right it'll take you about a year, I
reckon, and then you ain't done.  You got to git brains--buffalo brains
is best--and smear all over it, and let 'em dry in.  Then you got to
take your hide up and rub it till it's plum soft.  That'll take you a
couple of weeks, I reckon.  Then you kin smoke it, if you have got any
place to smoke it, an' that'll take you a week, it you don't burn it
up.  Sometimes you kin whiten a hide by rubbin' it with white clay, if
you can git any clay.  That might take you a few days longer.  Oh, yes,
I reckon you kin git the hide tanned if you live long enough.  You'd
ought to put up a sign, 'Captain Franklin, Attorney at Law, an' Hide
Tanner.'"

Franklin laughed heartily at Curly's sarcasm.  "There's one thing sure,
Curly," said he; "if I ever get this thing done I shall have to do the
work myself, for no one ever knew you to do any work but ride a horse.
Now, I think I can tan this hide, and do it in less than a year, and in
less than a week, too.  I can peg it out, and I can make me the iron
hoe, and I can soften the hide with brains, and I can rub it until it
is finished.  I have, or can get, about all the ingredients you mention
except the clay.  If I had some white pipe clay I believe I could
really make me a beautiful robe for a counterpane for my bed next
winter."

"If it's only clay you want," said Curly lazily, "I can git you plenty
of that."

"Where?" said Franklin.

"Over in a little holler, to the crick back o' town," said Curly.  "You
go on an' tack out your hide, an' I'll ride over and git you some."

"How'll you carry it," said Franklin, "if you go on horseback?"

"Kerry it!"  said Curly contemptuously.  "How'd you s'pose I'd kerry
it?  Why, in my hat, o' course!" and he rode off without deigning
further explanation.  Franklin remained curious regarding this episode
until, an hour later, Curly rode up to the house again, carrying his
hat by the brim, with both hands before him, and guiding his pony with
his knees.  He had, indeed, a large lump of white, soft clay, which he
carried by denting in the crown of his hat and crowding the clay into
the hollow.  After throwing down the clay and slapping the hat a few
times on his knee, he seemed to think his headgear not injured by this
transaction.

"There's yer blamed clay," said he; "it'll be a good while before you
need it, but there she is."

The two were joined at this juncture by Battersleigh, who had come over
to pay a morning visit, and who now stood looking on with some interest
at the preparations in progress.

"It's makin' ye a robe is it, Ned, me boy?" said he.  "I'm bound it's a
fine thing ye'll do.  I'll give yer four dollars if ye'll do as much
for me.  Ye wouldn't be leavin' old Batty to sleep cold o' nights, now,
wud ye, Ned?"

"Oh, go tan your own robes," said Franklin cheerfully.  "I'm not in the
wholesale line."

"You might git Juan to tan you all one or two," said Curly.  "He kin
tan ez good ez ary Injun ever was."

"But, by the way, Curly," said Franklin, "how is Juan this morning?  We
haven't heard from him for a day or two."

"Oh, him?" said Curly.  "Why, he's all right.  He's just been layin'
'round a little, like a dog that's been cut up some in a wolf fight,
but he's all right now.  Shoulder's about well, an' as fer the
knife-cut, it never did amount to nothin' much.  You can't hurt a
Greaser much, not noways such a big one as Juan.  But didn't he git
action in that little difficulty o' his'n?  You could a-broke the whole
Cheyenne tribe, if you could a-got a-bettin' with 'em before that
fight."

"Odds was a hundred to one against us, shure," said Battersleigh,
seating himself in the doorway of the shack.  "Ye may call the big boy
loco, or whativer ye like, but it's grateful we may be to him.  An'
tell me, if ye can, why didn't the haythins pile in an' polish us all
off, after their chief lost his number?  No, they don't rush our works,
but off they go trailin', as if 'twas themselves had the odds against
'em, och-honin' fit to set ye crazy, an' carryin' their dead, as if the
loss o' one man ended the future o' the tribe.  Faith, they might
have--  Ned, ye're never stretchin' that hide right."

"Them Cheyennes was plenty hot at us fer comin' in on their huntin'
grounds," said Curly, "an' they shore had it in fer us.  I don't think
it was what their chief said to them that kep' them back from jumpin'
us, ater the fight was over.  It's a blame sight more likely that they
got a sort o' notion in their heads that Juan was bad medicine.  It
they get it in their minds that a man is _loco_, an' pertected by
spirits, an' that sort o' thing, they won't fight him, fer fear o'
gettin' the worst of it.  That's about why we got out of there, I
reckon.  They'd a-took our hosses an' our guns an' our meat, an' been
blame apt not to a-fergot our hair, too, if they hadn't got the idee
that Juan was too much fer 'em.  I'll bet they won't come down in there
again in a hundred years'"

"I felt sad for them," said Franklin soberly.

Curly smiled slowly.  "Well, Cap," said he, "they's a heap o' things
out in this here country that seems right hard till you git used to
'em.  But what's the ust carin' 'bout a dead Injun here or there?  They
got to go, one at a time, or more in a bunch.  But now, do you know
what they just done with ole Mr. White Calf?  Why, they taken him out
along with 'em a ways, till they thought we was fur enough away from
'em, an' then they probably got a lot of poles tied up, or else found a
tree, an' they planted him on top of a scaffold, like jerked beef, an'
left him there fer to dry a-plenty, with all his war clothes on and his
gun along with him.  Else, if they couldn't git no good place like
that, they likely taken him up on to a highish hill, er some rocky
place, an' there they covered him up good an' deep with rocks, so'st
the wolves wouldn't bother him any.  They tell me them buryin' hills is
great places fer their lookouts, an' sometimes their folks'll go up on
top o' them hills and set there a few days, or maybe overnight,
a-hopin' they'll dream something.  They want to dream something that'll
give 'em a better line on how to run off a whole cavvie-vard o' white
men's hosses, next time they git a chanct."

"Ye're a d----d Philistine, Curly," said Battersleigh calmly.

"I'm sorry for them," repeated Franklin, thoughtfully, as he sat idly
fingering the lump of clay that lay between his feet.  "Just think, we
are taking' away from these people everything in the world they had.
They were happy as we are--happier, perhaps--and they had their little
ambitions, the same as we have ours.  We are driving them away from
their old country, all over the West, until it is hard to see where
they can get a foothold to call their own.  We drive them and fight
them and kill them, and then--well, then we forget them."

Curly had a certain sense of politeness, so he kept silence for a time.
"Well," said he at length, "a Injun could tan hides better'n a white
man kin--at least some white men."

"I'm not so sure of that," said Franklin, rousing and replying stoutly.
"The white man wins by dodging the issue.  Now, look you, the Indian
squaw you tell me about would probably hack and hack away at this hide
by main strength in getting the flesh off the inside.  I am sure I
shall do it better, because I shall study which way the muscles run,
and so strip off the flesh along those lines, and not across them."

"I didn't know that made any difference," said Curly.  "Besides, how
kin you tell?"

"Well, now, maybe there are some things you don't know, after all,
Curly," said Franklin.  "For instance, can you tell me how many boss
ribs there are in the hump of a buffalo?"

"Well, no--o," admitted Curly.  "But what's the difference, so long ez
I know they're all good to eat ?"

"Plainly, a d----d Philistine," said Battersleigh again, striking a
match for his pipe.  "But I'm not sure but he had you there, Ned, me
boy."

"I'll show you," said Franklin eagerly.  "Here it is on the hide.  The
hump came to here.  Here was the knee joint--you can see by the whirl
in the muscles as plainly as you could by the curl in the hair
there--you can see it under a wolf's leg, the same way; the hair
follows the lines of the muscles, you know.  Wait, I could almost make
you a dummy out of the clay.  Now, look here--"

"You're a funny sort o' a feller, Cap," said Curly, "but if you're
goin' to tan that hide you'd better finish peggin' it out, an' git to
work on it."




CHAPTER XIII

PIE AND ETHICS

One morning Battersleigh was at work at his little table, engaged, as he
later explained, upon the composition of a letter to the London Times,
descriptive of the Agrarian Situation in the United States of America,
when he was interrupted by a knock at his door.

"Come in, come in, Ned, me boy," he exclaimed, as he threw open the door
and recognised his visitor.  "What's the news this mornin'?"

"News?" said Franklin gaily, holding his hands behind his back.  "I've
news that you can't guess--good news."

"You don't mean to tell me they've moved the land office into Ellisville,
do you, Ned?"

"Oh, no, better than that."

"You've not discovered gold on your quarter section, perchance?"

"Guess again--it's better than that."

"I'll give it up.  But leave me a look at your hands."

"Yes," said Franklin, "I'll give you a look, and one more guess."  He
held up a small bag before Battersleigh's face.

"It's not potatoes, Ned?" said Battersleigh in an awed tone of voice.
Franklin laughed.

"No; better than that," he said.

"Ned," said Battersleigh, "do ye mind if I have a bit smell of that bag?"

"Certainly," said Franklin, "you may have a smell, if you'll promise to
keep your hands off."

Battersleigh approached his face to the bag and snuffed at it once,
twice, thrice, as though his senses needed confirmation.  He straightened
up and looked Franklin in the face.

"Ned," said he, his voice sinking almost to a whisper, "it's--it's
apples!"

"Right," said Franklin.  "And isn't that news?"

"The best that could be, and the hardest to believe," said Battersleigh.
"Where'd you get thim, and how?"

"By diplomacy," said Franklin.  "Morrison, one of the transit men of the
engineers, was home in Missouri for a visit, and yesterday he came back
and brought a sack of apples with him.  He was so careless that he let
the secret out, and in less than half an hour he had lost two thirds of
his sack of apples--the boys wheedled them out of him, or stole them.  At
last he put the bag, with what was left of the apples, in the safe at the
hotel, and left orders that no one should have even a look at them.  I
went out and sent a man in to tell the clerk that he was wanted at the
depot, and while he was away I looted the safe--it wasn't locked--and ran
for it.  It was legitimate, wasn't it?  I gave Sam one big red apple, for
I knew he would rather have it, to give to his Nora, the waiter girl,
than the best horse and saddle on the range.  The rest--behold them!
Tell me, do you know how to make a pie?"

"Ned," said Battersleigh, looking at him with an injured air, "do you
suppose I've campaigned all me life and not learned the simplest form of
cookin'?  Pie?  Why, man, I'll lay you a half section of land to a saddle
blanket I'll make ye the best pie that ever ye set eye upon in all your
life.  Pie, indeed, is it?"

"Well," said Franklin, "you take some risks, but we'll chance it.  Go
ahead.  We'll just save out two or three apples for immediate
consumption, and not put all our eggs in one basket."

"Wisely spoken, me boy," said Battersleigh.  "Ye're a thrue conservative.
But now, just ye watch Batty while he goes to work."

Battersleigh busied himself about the little box which made his cupboard,
and soon had out what he called his "ingraydeyints."

"Of course, ye've to take a little flour," he said, "that's for the
osseous structure, so to speak.  Ye've to add a little grease of some
sort, lard or butter, an' we've nayther; the bacon fat'll do, methinks.
Of course, there's the bakin' powder.  Fer I've always noticed that when
ye take flour ye take also bakin' powder.  Salt?  No, I'm sure there's no
salt goes in at all; that's against reason, an' ye'll notice that the
principles of philosophy go into all the ways of life.  And, lastly,
makin', as I may say, the roundin' out of the muscular and adipose tissue
of the crayture, as the sowl of the pie we must have the apples.  It's a
sin to waste 'em peelin'; but I think they used to peel 'em, too.  And
ye've to put in sugar, at laste a couple o' spoons full.  Now observe.  I
roll out this dough--it's odd-actin' stuff, but it's mere idiosyncrashy
on its part--I roll this out with a bottle, flat and fine; and I put into
this pan, here, ye'll see.  Then in goes the intayrior contints, cut in
pieces, ye'll see.  Now, thin, over the top of the whole I sprid this
thin blanket of dough, thus.  And see me thrim off the edges about the
tin with me knife.  And now I dint in the shircumference with me thumb,
the same as July Trelawney did in the Ould Tinth.  And there ye are,
done, me pie, an' may God have mercy on your sowl!--Ned, build up the
fire."

They sat at the side of the little stove somewhat anxiously waiting for
the result of Battersleigh's labours.  Every once in a while Battersleigh
opened the oven door and peered in.  "She isn't brownin' just to suit me,
Ned," he said, "but that's the fault o' the chimney."  Franklin opined
that this anxiety boded no certainty of genius, but kept silent.  "I'm
wonderin' if it's right about that bakin' powder?" said Battersleigh.
"Is it too late now, do ye think?"

"This isn't my pie, Battersleigh," said Franklin, "but if anything has
gone wrong with those apples it'll take more than a little diplomacy to
get you out of the trouble."

As they sat for a moment silent there came the sound of approaching
hoof-beats, and presently the cracking and popping of the feet of a
galloping horse fell into a duller crunch on the hard ground before the
door, and a loud voice called out,

"Whoa-hope, Bronch!  Hello, in the house!"

"Come in, Curly," cried Battersleigh.  "Come in.  We've business of
importhance this mornin'."

Curly opened the door a moment later, peering in cautiously, the sunshine
casting a rude outline upon the floor, and his figure to those within
showing silhouetted against the background of light, beleggined,
befringed, and begloved after the fashion of his craft.

"How! fellers," he said, as he stooped to enter at the low door.  "How is
the world usin' you all this bright and happy mornin'?"

"Pretty well, me friend," said Battersleigh, his eyes on the stove,
importantly.  "Sit ye down."

Curly sat down on the edge of the bed, under whose blanket the newspapers
still rattled to the touch, "Seems like you all mighty busy this
mornin'," said he.

"Yes," said Franklin, "we've got business on hand now.  You can't guess
what we're cooking."

"No; what?"

"Pie."

"Go 'long!"

"Yes, sir, pie," said Franklin firmly.

Curly leaned back on the bed upon his elbow, respectful but very
incredulous.

"Our cook made a pie, onct," said he, to show himself also a man of
worldly experience.  "That was down on the Cimarron, 'bout four years
ago.  We et it.  I have et worse pie 'n that, an' I have et better.  But
I never did git a chance to eat all the pie I wanted, not in my whole
life.  Was you sayin' I'm in on this here pie?"

"Certainly you are.  You wait.  It'll be done now pretty soon," said
Franklin.

"If ye can poke a straw into thim, they're done," said Battersleigh
oracularly.  "Curly, hand me the broom."

Curly passed over the broom, and the two, with anxiety not unmixed with
cynicism, watched Battersleigh as he made several ineffectual attempts to
penetrate the armour of the pie.

"Stop lookin' at me like a brace o' evil-minded hyenies," protested
Battersleigh.  "Ye'd make the devil himself nervous, a-reghardin' one so
like a object o' suspicion.  Mind ye, I'm goin' to take it out.  There's
nothin' at all whativver in that ijee of stickin' it with a straw.
Moreover, these straws is shameful."

The others watched him eagerly as he removed the hot tin from the oven
and set it upon the bare table.

"I'm thinkin' it looks a bit dumpish midships, Ned," said Battersleigh
dubiously.  "But there's one thing shure, ye'll find all the apples in
it, for I've watched the stove door meself, and there's been no
possibility fer them to escape.  And of course ye'll not forgit that the
apples is the main thing in an apple pie.  The crust is merely a
secondary matter."  Battersleigh said this in an airy manner which
disarmed criticism.  Curly drew his clasp knife from his pocket and cut
into the portion assigned to him.  Franklin was reserved, but Curly
attained enthusiasm at the second bite.

"Rile Irish," said he, "I'm not so sure you're such a h----l of a military
man, but as a cook you're a burnin' success.  You kin sign with our
outfit tomorrer if you want to.  Man, if I could bake pie like that, I'd
break the Bar O outfit before the season was over!  An' if I ever could
git all the pie I wanted to eat, I wouldn't care how quick after that I
fanned out.  This here is the real thing.  That pie that our cook made on
the Cimarron--why, it was made of dried apples.  Why didn't you tell me
you had real apples?"

The pie, startling as it was in some regards, did not long survive the
determined assault made upon it. Curly wiped his knife on the leg of his
"chaps" and his mouth on the back of his hand.

"But say, fellers," he said, "I plumb forgot what I come over here for.
They's goin' to be a dance over to town, an' I come to tell you about it.
O' course you'll come."

"What sort of a dance can it be, man?" said Battersleigh.

"Why, a plumb dandy dance; reg'lar high-steppin' outfit; _mucha baille_;
best thing ever was in this settlement."

"I'm curious to know where the ladies will come from," said Franklin.

"Don't you never worry," rejoined Curly.  "They's plenty o' women-folks.
Why, there's the section boss, his wife--you know her--she does the
washin' for most everybody.  There's Nora, Sam's girl, the head waiter;
an' Mary, the red-headed girl; an' Kitty, the littlest waiter girl; an'
the new grocery man's wife; an' Hank Peterson's wife, from down to his
ranch.  Oh, there'll be plenty o' ladies, don't you never doubt.  Why,
say, Sam, he told me, last time he went down to Plum Centre, he was goin'
to ask Major Buford an' his wife, an' the gal that's stayin' with
them--tall gal, fine looker--why, Sam, he said he would ast them, an'
maybe they'd come up to the dance--who knows?  Sam, he says that gal
ain't no common sort--whole outfit's a puzzler to him, he says, Sam does."

"And when does this all happen, Curly, boy?" asked Battersleigh.

"Why, night after to-morrer night, to the big stone hotel.  They're goin'
to clean out the dinin'-room for us.  Three niggers, two fiddlers, an' a
'cordion--oh, we'll have music all right!  You'll be over, of course?"

"That we will, me boy," responded Battersleigh.  "It's mesilf will
inthrojuce Captain Franklin to his first haythin ball.  Our life on the
claim's elevatin', for it leaves time for thought, but it is a bit slow
at times.  An' will we come?  Man, we'll be the first."

"Well, then, so long, fellers," said Curly.  "I got to be movin' along a
little.  See you at the dance, sure."

"Now, as to a ball, Battersleigh," said Franklin, argumentatively, when
they were alone, "how can I go?  I've not the first decent thing to wear
to such a place."

"Tut, tut!" said Battersleigh.  "There speaks the coxcombry of youth.  I
make no doubt ye'd be the best-dressed man there if ye'd go as ye stand
now.  But what about Batty?  On me honour, Ned, I've never been so low in
kit as I am this season here, not since I was lance sergeant in the
Tinth.  You're able to pull out your blue uniform, I know, an' b'gad! the
uniform of an officer is full dress the worrld over!  Look at Batty, half
mufti, and his allowance a bit late, me boy.  But does Batty despair?  By
no means.  'Tis at times like this that gaynius rises to the occasion."

Franklin grinned amiably.  "Thank you for the suggestion about the
uniform, at least," he said.  "Now, if we can fix you up as well."

Battersleigh came and stood before him, waving a long forefinger.

"Listen to me, Ned," he began, "an' I'll lay down to ye a few of the
fundamental rules of conduct and appar'l.

"A gintleman never lies; a gintleman never uses unseemly haste; a
gintleman is always ready for love and ready for war--for, Ned, me boy,
without love and war we'd miss the only two joys of life.  Thereto, a
gintleman must shoot, fence, ride, dance, and do anny of 'em like a
gintleman.  For outwardly appar'l, seein' him clane within, me boy, a
gintleman should make the best of what he finds about him.  I have slept
sweet in turban or burnous in me time.  Dress is nothing that we may
always control.  But if ye found yeself a bit low in kit, as Batty is
this day, what would ye say, Ned, me boy, was the first salient--what is
the first essintial in the dress of a gintleman, me boy?"

"Linen," said Franklin, "or is it gloves?"

"Ned," said Battersleigh solemnly, laying a hand upon his shoulder,
"ye're the dearest boy in the world.  Ye're fit to be lance sergeant
yersilf in the ould Tinth Rigiment.  Right ye are, quite right.  White,
white, me boy, is the first colour of a gintleman!  White, to show the
integrity of his honour and the claneness of his merit roll.  Shure, he
must have his weapons, and his horse--for a gintleman always rides--and
his hat and gloves are matter of course.  But, first of all, essintial to
him as the soap and crash, is white, sir--yes, white!  A touch of white
at neck and wrist anny gintleman must show who presints himself at a
ball."

"But, now, how?"

Battersleigh pointed a long finger at Franklin, then turned it upon
himself, tapping with import upon his forehead.  "Look at me, at Batty,"
he said.  "Here is where gaynius comes in, me friend.  I may be far from
the home that bore me--God prosper them that knows it now!--and I may be
a bit behind with me allowance; but never yet was Batty without the arms
and the appar'l of a gintleman.  Ned, come with me."

Grasping his companion by the arm, Battersleigh stepped outside the
house, and strode off with long steps across the prairie.  "Come," he
said, as one who commanded alike secrecy and despatch.  Humouring him,
Franklin followed for a quarter of a mile.  Then, bending his gaze in the
direction of the march, he saw afar, fluttering like a signal of distress
in the engulfing sea about, a little whipping flag of white, which was
upheld by the gaunt hand of a ragged sage bush.  This, as he drew near,
he discovered to be a portion of an old flour sack, washed clean and left
bleaching in the sun and wind until it had assumed a colour a shade more
pure than its original dinginess.

Battersleigh made dramatic approach.  "There!" said he, pointing with
triumphant dignity to the fluttering rag.

"Yes, I see," said Franklin, "but what do you want of this piece of sack?"

"Sack!" cried Battersleigh, offended.  "'Sack!' say you, but I say,
'White!'  Look ye, the history of a man is something sacred.  'Sack!' say
you, but I say, 'White!'  A strip of this at me neck and at me wrist; me
hat, an' me sabre and me ridin' whip--I r-ride up to the dure.  I
dismount.  I throw me rein to the man.  I inter the hall and place me hat
and gloves in order as they should be.  I appear--Battersleigh, a
gintleman, appears, standin' in the dure, the eyes of all upon him.  I
bow, salutin', standin' there, alone, short on allowance, but nate and
with me own silf-respect.  Battersleigh, a bit low in kit and in
allowance, with white at neck and wrist, bows, and he says, 'Ladies and
gintlemen, Battersleigh is here!'"




CHAPTER XIV

THE FIRST BALL AT ELLISVILLE

The wife of the section boss sat in conscious dignity, as became a
leader of society.  She was gowned in purple, newly starched, and upon
her bosom rose and fell the cross that Jerry gave her long ago.  Below
her in order of station came Nora, the head waiter, and the red-headed
waiter girl, and the littlest waiter girl, and the wife of the new
grocery man.  These sat silent and unhappy at one part of the long row
of chairs that lined the side of the hall.  Opposite to them, equally
silent and equally unhappy, sat a little row of men.  Jerry, the
section boss, made no claim to social distinction.  He was a simple,
plain, hard-working man, whose main concern was in his work, and whose
great pride was in the social triumphs of his wife.  Jerry was short
and broad and sturdy, and his face was very, very red.  Near to Jerry
sat the new grocery man, and Curly the cowboy, and Del Hickman, another
cowboy, and several other cowboys, and Sam, the stage-driver.  They
were all silent and very miserable.  The lights of the big hanging
kerosene lamps flickered and cast great shadows, showing the women all
with heads very high and backs straight and stiff, the men in various
attitudes of jellyfish, with heads hanging and feet screwed under their
chairs in search of moral support.

It was the beginning of the ball.  These were the first arrivals.  At
the head of the hall, far off, sat three musicians, negroes alleged to
play violins and an accordion, and by that merit raised to a bad
eminence.  Gloomy, haughty, superior, these gazed sternly out before
them, ready for the worst.  Now and then they leaned over the one
toward another, and ventured some grim, ghastly remark.  Once the
leader, an old and gray-haired man, was heard to utter, inadvertently
above his breath, the ominous expression, "Yass, indeed!"  All in all,
the situation was bodeful in the extreme.  There was no speech other
than that above noted.

After a vast hiatus the door at the main entrance was pulled cautiously
open, a little at a time.  Evidently some one was looking in.  The
consciousness of this caused two or three men to shuffle their feet a
trifle upon the floor, as though they expected the death march soon to
begin.  The littlest waiter girl, unable to stand the nervous strain,
tittered audibly, which caused Nora, the head waiter, to glare at her
through her glasses.  At length the door opened, and two figures
entered affrightedly, those of Hank Peterson, a neighbouring rancher,
and his wife.  Hank was dressed in the costume of the time, and the
high heels of his boots tapped uncertainly as he made his way over the
wide hollow-sounding floor, his feet wabbling and crossing in his
trepidation.  None the less, having forthwith decoyed to the row of men
sitting silent against the wall, he duly reached that harbour and sank
down, wiping his face and passing his hand across his mouth
uncertainly.  His wife was a tall, angular woman, whose garb was like
that of most of the other women--cotton print.  Yet her hair was combed
to the point of fatality, and at her neck she had a collarette of what
might have been lace, but was not.  Conscious of the inspection of all
there assembled, Mrs. Peterson's conduct was different from that of her
spouse.  With head held very high and a glance of scorn, as of one
hurling back some uttered word of obloquy, she marched down the hall to
the side occupied by the ladies; nay, even passed the full line as in
daring review, and seated herself at the farther end, with head
upright, as ready for instant sally of offence.

The door opened again and yet again.  Two or three engineers, a rodman,
a leveller, and an axeman came in, near behind them more cattlemen.
From among the guests of the hotel several came, and presently the
clerk of the hotel himself.  The line of men grew steadily, but the
body upon the opposite side of the room remained constant, immobile,
and unchanged.  At these devoted beings there glared many eyes from
across the room.  More and more frequent came the scrape of a foot
along the floor, or the brief cough of perturbation.  One or two very
daring young men leaned over and made some remark in privacy, behind
the back of the hand, this followed by a nudge and a knowing look,
perhaps even by a snicker, the latter quickly suppressed.  Little by
little these bursts of courage had their effect.  Whispers became
spasmodic, indeed even frequent.

"Say, Curly," whispered Del Hickman hoarsely to his neighbour, "ef
somethin' don't turn loose right soon I'm due to die right here.  I'm
thirstier'n if this here floor was the Staked Plains."

"Same here," said Curly in a muttered undertone.  "But I reckon we're
here till the round-up's made.  When she do set loose, you watch me
rope that littlest waiter girl.  She taken my eye, fer shore."

"That's all right, friend," said Del, apparently relieved.  "I didn't
know but you'd drew to the red-headed waiter girl.  I sorter 'lowed I'd
drift over in thataway, when she starts up."

Sam, the driver, was sitting rapt, staring mutely across the great gulf
fixed between him and Nora, the head waiter.  Nora, by reason of her
authority in position, was entitled to wear a costume of white, whereas
the waiters of lower rank were obliged by house rules to attire
themselves in dark skirts.  To Sam's eyes, therefore, Nora, arrayed in
this distinguishing garb, appeared at once the more fair and the more
unapproachable.  As she sat, the light glinting upon her glasses, her
chin well upheld, her whole attitude austere and commanding, Sam felt
his courage sink lower and lower, until he became abject and abased.
Fascinated none the less, he gazed, until Curly poked him sharply and
remarked:

"Which 'un you goin' to make a break fer, Sam?"

"I--I d-d-don't know," said Sam, startled and disturbed.

"Reckon you'd like to mingle some with Nory, hey?"

"W-w-w-well--" began Sam defensively.

"But she don't see it that way.  Not in a hundred.  Why, she'll be
dancin' with Cap Franklin, or Batty, er some folks that's more in her
line, you see.  Why in h----l don't you pick out somebody more in yer own
bunch, like?"  Curly was meaning to be only judicial, but he was cruel.
Sam collapsed and sat speechless.  He had long felt that his ambition
was sheer presumption.

The hours grew older.  At the head of the hall the musicians manifested
more signs of their inexorable purpose.  A sad, protesting squeal came
from the accordion.  The violins moaned, but were held firm.  The worst
might be precipitated at any moment.

But again there was a transfer of the general attention toward the
upper end of the hall.  The door once more opened, and there appeared a
little group of three persons, on whom there was fixed a regard so
steadfast and so silent that it might well have been seen that they
were strangers to all present.  Indeed, there was but one sound audible
in the sudden silence which fell as these three entered the room.  Sam,
the driver, scraped one foot unwittingly upon the floor as he half
leaned forward and looked eagerly at them as they advanced.

Of the three, one was a tall and slender man, who carried himself with
that ease which, itself unconscious, causes self-consciousness in those
still some generations back of it.  Upon the arm of this gentleman was
a lady, also tall, thin, pale, with wide, dark eyes, which now opened
with surprise that was more than half shock.  Lastly, with head up and
eyes also wide, like those of a stag which sees some new thing, there
came a young woman, whose presence was such as had never yet been seen
in the hotel at Ellisville.  Tall as the older lady by her side, erect,
supple, noble, evidently startled but not afraid, there was that about
this girl which was new to Ellisville, which caused the eye of every
man to fall upon her and the head of every woman to go up a degree the
higher in scorn and disapprobation.  This was a being of another world.
There was some visitation here.  Mortal woman, woman of the Plains,
never yet grew like this.  Nor had gowns like these--soft, clinging,
defining, draping--ever occurred in history.  There was some mistake.
This creature had fallen here by error, while floating in search of
some other world.

Astonished, as they might have been by the spectacle before them of the
two rows of separated sex, all of whom gazed steadfastly in their
direction; greeted by no welcoming hand, ushered to no convenient seat,
these three faced the long, half-lit room in the full sense of what
might have been called an awkward situation.  Yet they did not shuffle
or cough, or talk one with another, or smile in anguish, as had others
who thus faced the same ordeal.  Perhaps the older lady pressed the
closer to the gentleman's side, while the younger placed her hand upon
his shoulder; yet the three walked slowly, calmly, deliberately down
into what must have been one of the most singular scenes hitherto
witnessed in their lives.  The man did not forsake his companions to
join the row of unfortunates.  As they reached the head of the social
rank, where sat Mrs. McDermott, the wife of the section boss and
_arbiter elegantiarum_ for all Ellisville, the gentleman bowed and
spoke some few words, though obviously to a total stranger--a very
stiff and suspicious stranger, who was too startled to reply.

The ladies bowed to the wife of the section boss and to the others as
they came in turn.  Then the three passed on a few seats apart from and
beyond the other occupants of that side of the house, thus leaving a
break in the ranks which caused Mrs. McDermott a distinct sniff and
made the red-headed girl draw up in pride.  The newcomers sat near to
the second lamp from the musicians' stand, and in such fashion that
they were half hid in the deep shadows cast by that erratic luminary.

There was now much tension, and the unhappiness and suspense could have
endured but little longer.  Again the accordion protested and the
fiddle wept.  The cornet uttered a faint note of woe.  Yet once more
there was a pause in this time of joy.

Again the door was pushed open, not timidly, but flung boldly back.
There stood two figures at the head of the hall and in the place of
greatest light.  Of these, one was tall and very thin, but upright as a
shaft of pine.  Over his shoulder hung a cloak, which he swept aside
over his arm with a careless and free gesture of unconcern.  He was
clad in dark garments; thus much might be said.  His face, clean shaven
but for the long and pointed mustaches and goatee, was high and bold,
his gaze confident and merry.  His waistcoat sat high and close.  At
wrist and neck there showed a touch of white, and a bit of white
appeared protruding at the bosom of his coat.  His tread was supple and
easy as that of a boy of twenty.  "Ned, me boy," he whispered to his
companion as they entered, "I'm feelin' fine the night; and as for
yerself, ye're fit for the court o' St. James at a diplomats' ball."

Franklin, indeed, deserved somewhat of the compliment.  He was of that
rare figure of man which looks well whether clad for the gymnasium or
the ball, upon which clothing does not merely hang, but which fills out
and dignifies the apparel that may be worn.  In height the ex-captain
was just below the six-foot mark which so often means stature but not
strength, and he carried every inch of his size with proportions which
indicated vigour and activity.  He walked now with the long, easy
hip-stride of the man whose sides and back are not weak, but strong and
hardened.  His head, well set upon the neck, was carried with the chin
unconsciously correct, easily, not stiffly.  His shoulders were broad
enough to hang nicely over the hips, and they kept still the setting-up
of the army drill.  Dressed in the full uniform of a captain, he looked
the picture of the young army officer of the United States, though
lacking any of the arrogance which might come from the purely military
life.  Simply, easily, much as had the little group that immediately
preceded himself and friend, Franklin passed on up into the hall,
between the batteries which lined the walls.

Any emergency brings forward its own remedy.  The times produce the
man, each war bringing forth its own generals, its heroes, its solvers
of great problems.  Thus there came now to these persons assembled,
deadlocked, unguided, unhappy, who might else have sat forever rooted
to this spot, the man who was to save them, to lead them forth out of
their wilderness of incertitude.

None had chosen Battersleigh to the leadership.  He came as mere guest,
invited as were the others.  There had been no election for master of
ceremonies, nor had Battersleigh yet had time to fully realize how
desperate was this strait in which these folk had fallen.  It appeared
to him merely that, himself having arrived, there was naught else to
cause delay.  At the centre of the room he stopped, near by the head of
the stern column of womanhood which held the position on the right as
one entered the hall.  Here Battersleigh paused, making a deep and
sweeping bow, and uttered the first open speech which had been heard
that evening.

"Ladies and gintlemen," he said in tones easily distinguishable at all
parts of the room, "I'm pleased to meet ye all this evenin'.  Perhaps
ye all know Battersleigh, and I hope ye'll all meet me friend Captain
Franklin, at me side.  We claim the inthroduction of this roof, me good
friends, and we welcome everybody to the first dance at Ellisville.
Ladies, yer very dutiful servant!  It's well ye're lookin', Mrs.
McDermott; and Nora, gyurl, sure ye're charmin' the night.  Kittie,
darlin', how do ye do?  Do ye remember Captain Franklin, all of ye?
Pipe up, ye naygurs--that's right.  Now, thin, all hands, choose yer
partners fer the gr-rand march.  Mrs. McDermott, darlin', we'll lead
the march, sure, with Jerry's permission--how'll he help himself, I
wonder, if the lady says yis?  Thank ye, Mrs. McDermott, and me
arm--so."

The sheepish figures of the musicians now leaned together for a moment.
The violins wailed in sad search for the accord, the assistant
instrument less tentative.  All at once the slack shoulders
straightened up firmly, confidently, and then, their feet beating in
unison upon the floor, their faces set, stern and relentless, the three
musicians fell to the work and reeled off the opening bars.

A sigh went up from the assembly.  There was a general shuffling of
shoes, a wide rustling of calico.  Feet were thrust forward, the body
yet unable to follow them in the wish of the owner.  Then, slowly,
sadly, as though going to his doom, Curly arose from out the long line
of the unhappy upon his side of the room.  He crossed the intervening
space, his limbs below the knees curiously affected, jerking his feet
into half time with the tune.  He bowed so low before the littlest
waiter girl that his neck scarf fell forward from his chest and hung
before him like a shield.  "May I hev the honour, Miss Kitty?" he
choked out; and as the littlest waiter girl rose and took his arm with
a vast air of unconcern, Curly drew a long breath.

In his seat Sam writhed, but could not rise.  Nora looked straight in
front.  It was Hank Peterson, who led her forth, and who, after the
occasion was over, wished he had not done so, for his wife sat till the
last upon the row.  Seeing this awful thing happen, seeing the hand of
Nora laid upon another's arm, Sam sat up as one deeply smitten with a
hurt.  Then, silently, unobserved in the confusion, he stole away from
the fateful scene and betook himself to his stable, where he fell
violently to currying one of the horses.

"Oh, kick!" he exclaimed, getting speech in these surroundings.  "Kick!
I deserve it.  Of all the low-down, d----n cowards that ever was borned
I sure am the worst!  But the gall of that feller Peterson!  An' him a
merried man!"

When Sam left the ballroom there remained no person who was able to
claim acquaintance with the little group who now sat under the shadow
of the swinging lamp at the lower end of the hall, and farthest from
the door.  Sam himself might have been more courteous had not his
mental perturbation been so great.  As it was, the "grand march" was
over, and Battersleigh was again walking along the lines in company
with his friend Franklin, before either could have been said to have
noticed fully these strangers, whom no one seemed to know, and who sat
quite apart and unengaged.  Battersleigh, master of ceremonies by
natural right, and comfortable gentleman at heart, spied out these
three, and needed but a glance to satisfy himself of their identity.
Folk were few in that country, and Sam had often been very explicit in
his descriptions.

"Sir," said Battersleigh, approaching and bowing as he addressed the
stranger, "I shall make bold to introjuce meself--Battersleigh of
Ellisville, sir, at your service.  If I am not mistaken, you will be
from below, toward the next town.  I bid ye a very good welcome, and we
shall all hope to see ye often, sir.  We're none too many here yet, and
a gintleman and his family are always welcome among gintlemen.  Allow
me, sir, to presint me friend Captain Franklin, Captain Ned Franklin of
the--th' Illinois in the late unplisantness.--Ned, me boy,
Colonel--ye'll pardon me not knowin' the name?"

"My name is Buford, sir," said the other as he rose.  "I am very glad
to see you gentlemen.  Colonel Battersleigh, Captain Franklin.  I was
so unlucky as to be of the Kentucky troops, sir, in the same
unpleasantness.  I want to introduce my wife, gentlemen, and my niece,
Miss Beauchamp."

Franklin really lost a part of what the speaker was saying.  He was
gazing at this form half hidden in the shadows, a figure with hands
drooping, with face upturned, and just caught barely by one vagrant ray
of light which left the massed shades piled strongly about the heavy
hair.  There came upon him at that moment, as with a flood-tide of
memory, all the vague longing, the restlessness, the incertitude of
life which had harried him before he had come to this far land, whose
swift activity had helped him to forget.  Yet even here he had been
unsettled, unhappy.  He had missed, he had lacked--he knew not what.
Sometimes there had come vague dreams, recurrent, often of one figure,
which he could not hold in his consciousness long enough to trace to
any definite experience or association--a lady of dreams, against whom
he strove and whom he sought to banish.  Whom he had banished!  Whom he
had forgotten!  Whom he had never known!  Who had ever been in his life
a vague, delicious mystery!

The young woman rose, and stood out a pace or two from the shadows.
Her hand rested upon the arm of the elder lady.  She turned her face
toward Franklin.  He felt her gaze take in the uniform of blue, felt
the stroke of mental dislike for the uniform--a dislike which he knew
existed, but which he could not fathom.  He saw the girl turn more
fully toward him, saw upon her face a querying wonder, like that which
he had known in his own dreams!  With a strange, half-shivering gesture
the girl advanced half a step and laid her head almost upon the
shoulder of the elder woman, standing thus for one moment, the arms of
the two unconsciously entwined, as is sometimes the way with women.
Franklin approached rudeness as he looked at this attitude of the two,
still puzzling, still seeking to solve this troubling problem of the
past.

There came a shift in the music.  The air swept from the merry tune
into the minor from which the negro is never musically free.  Then in a
flash Franklin saw it all.  He saw the picture.  His heart stopped!

This music, it was the wail of trumpets!  These steps, ordered,
measured, were those of marching men.  These sounds, high, commingling,
they were the voices of a day gone swiftly by.  These two, this
one--this picture--it was not here, but upon the field of wheat and
flowers that he saw it now again--that picture of grief so infinitely
sad.

Franklin saw, and as he gazed, eager, half advancing, indecision and
irresolution dropped from him forever.  Resolved from out the shadows,
wherein it had never in his most intimate self-searching taken any
actual form, he saw the image of that unformulated dream which had
haunted his sub-consciousness so long, and which was now to haunt him
openly and forever.




CHAPTER XV

ANOTHER DAY

The morning after the first official ball in Ellisville dawned upon
another world.

The occupants of the wagons which trailed off across the prairies, the
horsemen who followed them, the citizens who adjourned and went as
usual to the Cottage--all these departed with the more or less
recognised feeling that there had happened a vague something which had
given Ellisville a new dignity, which had attached to her a new
significance.  Really this was Magna Charta.  All those who, tired and
sleepy, yet cheerful with the vitality of beef and air, were going home
upon the morning following the ball, knew in their souls that something
had been done.  Each might have told you in his way that a new web of
human interests and human antagonisms was now laid out upon the loom.
Rapid enough was to be the weaving, and Ellisville was early enough to
become acquainted with the joys and sorrows, the strivings and the
failures, the happinesses and bitternesses of organized humanity.

There are those who sneer at the communities of the West, and who
classify all things rural as crude and unworthy, entitled only to
tolerance, if they be spared contempt.  They are but provincials
themselves who are guilty of such attitude, and they proclaim only an
ignorance which itself is not entitled to the dignity of being called
intolerance.  The city is no better than the town, the town is no
better than the country, and indeed one is but little different from
the other.  Everywhere the problems are the same.  Everywhere it is
Life which is to be seen, which is to be lived, which is to be endured,
to be enjoyed.  Perhaps the men and women of Ellisville did not phrase
it thus, but surely they felt the strong current which warmed their
veins, which gave them hope and belief and self-trust, worth full as
much, let us say, as the planted and watered life of those who
sometimes live on the earnings of those who have died before them, or
on the labour of those who are enslaved to them.

Ellisville, after the first ball, was by all the rules of the Plains
admittedly a town.  A sun had set, and a sun had arisen.  It was
another day.

In the mind of Edward Franklin, when he was but a boy, there came often
problems upon which he pondered with all the melancholy seriousness of
youth, and as he grew to young manhood he found always more problems to
engage his thoughts, to challenge his imagination.  They told the boy
that this earth was but a part of a grand scheme, a dot among the
myriad stars.  He was not satisfied, but asked always where was the
Edge.  No recurrent quotient would do for him; he demanded that the
figures be conclusive.  They told him of the positive and negative
poles, and he wished to see the adjoining lines of the two hemispheres
of force.  Carrying his questionings into youth and manhood, they told
him--men and women told him, the birds told him, the flowers told
him--that there were marrying and giving in marriage, that there was
Love.  He studied upon this and looked about him, discovering a world
indeed divided into two hemispheres, always about to be joined since
ever time began.  But it seemed to him that this union must never be
that of mere chance.  There could be but one way right and fit for the
meeting of the two halves of life.  He looked about him in the little
village where he was brought up, and found that the men had married the
women who were there for them to marry.  They had never sailed across
seas, had never searched the stars, had never questioned their own
souls, asking, "Is this, then, the Other of me?"  Seeing that this was
the way of human beings, he was ashamed.  It aroused him to hear of
this man or that who, having attained a certain number of cattle or a
given amount of household goods, conceived himself now ready to marry,
and who therefore made court to the neighbour's daughter, and who
forthwith did marry her.  To his dreamer's heart it seemed that there
should be search, that there should be a sign, so that it should be
sure that the moment had come, that the Other had been found.  With
some men this delusion lasts very late.  With some women it endures
forever.  For these there may be, after all, anothe

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